Clough Evolution Lesson 8

The Flood

We now take up the sixth discussion of our block of material on the Bible and the teachings of the Bible in the area of creation and we come now to the sixth and last [can’t understand word], the flood. Now in discussing Noah’s flood we want to deal with two main items; the extent of the flood and the date of the flood.

As to the extent of the flood: an initial reading of Genesis will undoubtedly convince you that the flood is worldwide, global, it covers the entire earth. Needless to say, in our modern era, particularly since the early 1700s, this has caused fantastic problem of reconciliation with the picture of historical geology. But historical geology actually gives no evidence of such a universal worldwide flood so it is claimed, and therefore one finds one’s self at utter odds with historical geology in the issue of the flood. And so it behooves us as Bible students to see if we have been wrong in our interpretation of the flood from the text, or whether somehow historical geology has wrongly interpreted the information, the data.

Now the extent of the flood; I would say at the outset that dogmatically it can be shown that the flood was definitely global as far as Moses was concerned. In other words, there was no doubt in Moses mind and there was no doubt in any of the author’s mind in the rest of Scripture that the flood was global, it was not a local flood only covering a certain area of the earth. It was worldwide. Up until 1961 this has been argued on many basic things, usually on the idea that the adjective “all” is a relative adjective and although it says the flood covered all the mountains and so on, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean all the mountains, it could mean all the mountains in an area. And the people who advocated a local flood were on solid ground in this area because the adjective “all” is a relative adjective and truly must be defined from the context.

However, in 1961 a book came out called The Genesis Flood, written by John C. Whitcomb, Professor of Old Testament in Grace Seminary and Dr. Henry Morris, the head of the civil engineering department of Virginia Polytechnic, the book, The Genesis Flood, put out by the Presbyterian Reformed Publishing Company, 1951, was a bombshell on the evangelical world, very hotly debated, and you are either for it or against it. I happened to have done my Masters thesis reviewing the reviews of this book and besides the fact that it was an emotionally charged discussion, the whole thesis of the book was that the flood was worldwide, that this worldwide flood is utterly irreconcilable with present historical geology, and therefore present historical geology is wrong.

Now most people jump all over the authors for daring to suggest that historical geology is wrong, but none of the critics that I read, and I read some 40 reviews of the book, none of these critics ever once challenged Morris with some exegesis of Genesis 6-9 and therefore I feel that most of the criticism, 99% of the criticism against the book, The Genesis Flood, is utterly illogically irrelevant, simply because of the fact that their thesis depended not upon the fact that they were going to respect historical geology, their thesis depended upon the fact that if the Bible really did teach a universal flood, then as Bible-believing Christians we’re bound to respect the Word of God. And Morris & Whitcomb rearranged several of the arguments; in fact I think they had seven arguments, as I remember, for the universality of the flood, the global universality of the flood, the geographical universality of the flood. And I have criticized in some 200 odd pages their arguments and found that the following three arguments that they present are the strongest arguments for the universality of the flood, arguments which have never been successfully rebutted, never been successfully answered by critics. Therefore I would say that these three arguments are unanswerable; at least if they are answerable no one has yet come up with the answer to them.

So these are the three arguments, central arguments for the global nature of the flood. The first argument, the depth/time argument from Genesis 7:19-20. The depth/time argument is a modification of the old argument that… in Genesis 7:19, “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven were covered. [20] Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” Now previously it had been argued that this “all,” all the high mountains [“all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered”] and so on, that could be relative, maybe not all of them, just all of them within a certain region for example. But Morris and Whitcomb did a very shrewd line of argument and what they did was is to say all right, suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that “all” is a relative adjective. Just suppose we take “all” in a restricted sense, that is, we take it to say that there was covered only those mountains within a small area. All right, so now we have granted one of the local floodist’s contentions, namely that “all” is a relative and here means only those within a small region. So for the sake of argument then, let us say “all” is relative, “all” is only mountains within a very small geographical area.

Now our next problem, that’s the first step, our next step in the depth/time argument is to show the minimum area that could be denoted by Genesis 7:19-20 because in Genesis 7:19-20 it says the region spoken of is “under the whole heaven,” now what is the minimum area…the minimum region that could be denoted by this expression. Well, if you take a concordance and look up the expression under “all heaven,” you find it occurs approximately seven times elsewhere in Scripture. It occurs in Deuteronomy 2:25; in Deuteronomy 4:19; in Job 28:24; in Job 37:3; in Job 41:11; in Daniel 7:27 and Daniel 9:12. Now if you will carefully examine all of the seven usages for “under all the heaven,” you will find that at the very minimum it contains land of several hundred miles width.

The most restrictive use of “under all the heaven” occurs in Deuteronomy 2:25, where God says to Moses as the nation begins the Palestinian invasion, “This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble and be in anguish because of thee.” What is the minimum area that you think Deuteronomy 2:25 includes? If you turn back to Exodus 23:20-33 you will see where the regions of the Promised Land are defined.

You can read through that passage and when you get to verse 31 you’ll notice the boundaries. Exodus 23:31, “And I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines,” now the Red Sea spoken of in verse 31 is what we would call the Gulf of Aqaba, “even to the sea of the Philistines” is the Mediterranean, so there’s a line that runs from southeast to northwest, from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean Sea, “and from the desert unto the river,” now from the desert is the wilderness to the south of Palestine, and you run a line from there, from that southwest point, northeastward to “the river” and the river is the Euphrates, “for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand,” and so on, obviously showing that Israel in the Old Testament, with one exception during the Davidic and Solomonic eras, never really went to the bounds of their promised land. Now in Exodus 23:20-23 we have defined for us the minimum area of region of the earth that could possibly be…that is used in the Bible for the expression “under all the heavens.”

So even with Deuteronomy 2:25 which is the minimum region, we still have the fact that if we are to use the rest of Scripture as an analogy, then Genesis 7:19-20, when it says under all the heavens, even if we restrict this the minimum that we can restrict it to is a land several hundred miles in diameter.

So now suppose we go back to Genesis 7:19-20 and we make two restrictions, that people who advocate a local flood frequently make: one, “all the hills” is a relative term, it means only all the hills within a small region. And then we restrict the region as small as we can and the smallest we can restrict it is given in Deuteronomy 2:25. So therefore we ask ourselves the question, looking at a relief chart of the Ancient Near East, where can we find a region several hundred miles in diameter, where can we find such a region without some hills within that region exceeding several thousand feet above sea level? All you have to do is go and get a relief map of the Middle East, and this is a legitimate form of argument because those who advocate a local flood advocate zero change in topography throughout historical times. And so therefore it’s perfectly valid for us to argue on their premises, namely that a relief map is a valid picture of the land that was in existence at that time.

So suppose we take a relief map and we try to find some spot on the relief map where the land for several hundred miles is less than, say 500 feet above sea level, and you can’t find one because everywhere you look you find at least some prominent mountain or some prominent heist of land well above a thousand feet above mean sea level. And if this is true, then Genesis 7:19-20 would require that there be several thousand feet of water in this area. Now Morris and Whitcomb’s depth/time argument simply deduces from this water seeks it’s own level, and how can you maintain water several thousand feet in depth over only such a small area and yet not have this water spread across the face of the globe, especially when this depth has to be maintained, at the very minimum, for several months.

Now we come to the second argument for the worldwide extent of the flood and here we move from the depth/time argument to the proof from ark size and the proof from ark size is founded on an exactly opposite trend that most people take when they deal with the ark narratives in Genesis 6 and 9. Most people think the real problem in Genesis 6-9 is the fact that the ark is too small to take two of every kind of animal. And yet it can be shown, and this is the thrust of this argument, that the problem is not that the ark is too small, the problem is precisely the opposite way, the problem is that the ark is too large. If the ark was really built to save animals then the animals had to be aboard to saved. If it were large enough for many kinds it implies the flood was going to have to be deep enough to cover a variety of depths of land so they couldn’t evacuate and therefore be saved. So here in some ways it’s very similar to the depth/time argument in that if the ark really is large enough to take two of every kind of animal, then you are faced with a situation that obviously implies these animals could not escape by land migration. And if they could not escape by land migration to heights of land and so on, then it obviously shows that the water was deep enough to cover many, many varying levels of land including high mountains in the near locale. So there again we get back to the depth/time argument.

Now The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris has a section which I have never noticed commentators, critics of the book, to ever consider. They’re too busy throwing [can’t understand words] at the authors to even bother and look on pages 66-69. But if you will take time to look at pages 66-69 of Whitcomb and Morris’ book, The Genesis Flood, you will find where they show that the ark is definitely large enough to take two of every kind of animal necessary to be saved. Taking a cubit equal to 17.5 inches, Whitcomb and Morris compute that the volume of the ark is equal to 1,396,000 cubit feet or approximately equal in volume to 522 railroad cars, since the standard stock railroad car is 2670 cubit feet. So taking this as a standard stock car we would have 522 railroad stock cars with the same volume equal to the ark. Now this, of course, is assuming a rectilinear solid configuration for the ark and I recognize fully that recently there have been a [can’t understand words] in Time Magazine and other books by Jewish scholars suggesting that the ark was more of a prismatic form configuration. But as far as the text is concerned he has very, very, very little support for this; the normal impression you get from the text and the dimensions given is that it was a rectilinear solid configuration.

Now the total species is estimated…now this is species, and I want to say something here that we’ll amplify later on, there is no reason to assume the word “kind” in Scripture equals necessarily species. We’ll discuss this later, but just suppose it does and I think it doesn’t and I think this is an undue restriction on the argument, but let’s just go ahead and suppose that the word “kind” in Scripture is identical to the word “species.” Now the number of species existing today is estimated at 1,000,000. However, the ark did not have to carry fishes, echinoderms such as star fish and so on, mollusks, coelenterates such as corals and jelly fish, aquatic mammals, amphibians and so on, and so we are shaved down to a list of approximately 17,600 species that would have to have been taken aboard; taking a male and female of each one we get approximately 35,000 animals taken aboard the ark.

However, the standard size of such animals, if you average the size, cubic volume, cubic footage, volume and cubic feet, you will find the average size of the animal is equal to the sheep, and this sounds small but remember, there are many, many smaller animals than sheep versus and compared to the number of animals very much larger than the sheep. So the average is about the size of a sheep. Therefore they could be handled, not by 522 railroad cars, which is the volume of the ark, but 146 railroad cars. So the ark had room for about twice animals as it probably took. One may therefore ask, why build such a big ark if it is only for a local flood. Why bother and build it. Now some people have said well the ark was built to save domestic animals and also provide food for the inhabitants of the early postdiluvian world so that even though there might have been animals that survived at great distances, still these people would have had to have taken aboard some animals, domestic animals and other animals to survive, but this argument is founded on a very careless reading of the text because if you look at the text carefully, such as in Genesis 6:19 it says, “And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every kind.” Genesis 7:3, “Of fowls also of the air by sevens….” This shows you that there were only two taken of every animal except for the sacrificial animals and they were taking seven of these.

Now of the animals that were taken, even if we say there were seven taken of every kind of animal, even if there were seven, there still would be room enough in the ark for all of them. And even if there were seven, still this does not give evidence to suggest they were brought aboard merely for the sake of eating, because if they were brought aboard for the purpose of providing food for the early postdiluvian inhabitants one would suspect instead of taking two pigs, two horses, two of this and two of that you would have taken many, many pigs or many, many, many cattle or many, many, many sheep, but not just two of each kind. So therefore if these were really brought on for dietary reasons one rather suspects that God gave a very unusually varied diet to Noah. So I think this argument kind of breaks down; they were not just domestic animals; animals of every kind were taken and they were not taken for food because only two of each kind were taken. If they were taken for food there would be many, many, many, many animals of the kind that you would like to eat taken.

So that’s the second argument for universality of the flood, proving the ark was big enough to carry many, many different kinds of animals. If this be so, then it proves that these animals could not have survived by land migration, which proves that the flood must have been deep enough to cut off all migration routes, which proves that if the flood were to be in such a configuration of cutting off all animal migration routes for any length of time the water certainly would have spread over the entire globe. So these two arguments, I think, forcefully show that even when you lean over backwards, granting concessions to those who would see a local flood here, you still wind up with the inevitable conclusion, still are driven by logic, to posit a global worldwide flood.

Now the third argument for the universality of the flood and a very, very powerful one is found in 2 Peter 3. This argument is very important because since 1681 when Thomas Burnet wrote his book, Sacred History of the Earth, 2 Peter 3:5-7 have been taken as proof for the universality of the flood. And it’s interesting to me that no critic of The Genesis Flood has ever engaged the argument. 2 Peter 3 was quoted almost two dozen times in the book, The Genesis Flood and used as a crucial part of the argument and yet no critic ever dealt with this point and it’s significant. For example, when Bernard Ramm wrote his book, The Christian View of Science and Scripture, you look at the Scriptural index in the back and you can’t find 2 Peter 3:5-7. This omission is very significant because if even taken from a strict scholarly point of view, if you are to deal seriously and scholarly with the argument for universality you have got to deal with 2 Peter 3 and Ramm very flippantly refers in his book The Christian View of Science and Scripture, he says well, a quick examination of all New Testament passages doesn’t prove that they teach universality. And this is really almost dishonest in a way because 2 Peter 3 is so crucial, so central. If you examine the history of this debate back three centuries you find this occurring again and again and again and failure to deal with this argument just leaves you with the feeling that it’s an unanswerable argument.

If you look in 2 Peter 3:5 you see, “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water.” Now in the Greek it reads, “the heavens and earth of old,” this basically is the point, “heavens and earth of old,” in other words, the heavens and the earth of old times, verse 6, “By which the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. [7] But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” And if you examine the contrast between verses 5-7 you see that there’s a heavens and earth of old, mentioned in verse 7, and a heavens and earth now in verse 7. And there’s a definite contrast here; the heavens and earth which are now are not the same kind, there’s been a qualitative shift from the earlier regime, the pre-flood regime, the antediluvian conditions, a shift from those conditions to the postdiluvian situation, the post-flood situation. So when Peter says “the world that then was, being overflowed with water perished,” he’s not just talking about mankind, he’s talking about the entire physical configuration of the world. And he uses this as Jesus used it, in a context of the Second Advent.

And it’s interesting that Jesus could have used any number of illustrations out of the Old Testament to underscore the tremendous dimension of the catastrophe surrounding the Second Advent. He could have used, for example, the Exodus, which was a local catastrophe. He could have used Sodom and Gomorrah, which He did, but why is it that he picked and seized upon again and again the Noahic flood. For here, probably more than any other situation in the entire Old Testament, do you have an almost exact parallel with the Second Return of our Lord. You have in both situations a complete intervention into history physically and anthropologically by God.

These then are the three arguments which I feel prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Bible teaches a universal flood. Now I want to add to these three arguments a fourth argument and this is not a direct proof of the universality of the flood, this argument only shows that the flood could be global. In other words, this is only a supporting argument; it does not prove the universality of the flood directly. But I feel it gives strong indirect proof for the universality of the flood.

It concerns the physical disturbances that surrounded the flood, the physical disturbances that are recorded in the Bible. For example, let’s take the earthquakes and the geological phenomena recorded in the narrative of Genesis. If you look at Genesis 7:11, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.” Genesis 8:2, “The fountains also of the deep,” now what are the “fountains of the deep?” This is a hard phrase because it occurs only in this case in the Bible, in exactly this form, but there’s one reference in another book of the Old Testament where I think it gives you the clue as to how these Hebrew words picture what happened.

In the Hebrew you have a very similar type of expression in Isaiah 35:6, speaking of the millennium, “Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.” And here you have waters and streams breaking out, just as you have the fountains of the deep being broken in Genesis chapters 7 and 8, and I would suspect therefore that the means to attach to Genesis 7:11 and Genesis 8:2 is that the cause of much of the water of the flood was due to water breaking up through the surface of the earth, both under the sea and on the land; that you had great subterranean reservoirs of water, evidently used to water the pre-flood earth, and these reservoirs broke up and burst through the ground surface. One slight confirmation of this interpretation is the fact that in the extra-Biblical legends accompanying the chapters of Genesis it’s clear that the ancients understood it this way for we have several reports of ground breaking up and the water oozing our of the ground, and you have sort of like artesian wells all over the place erupting. You can trace this is much of the extra-Biblical literature.

Now back in Genesis 7:11 and Genesis 8:2 we read, not only “the fountains of the deep” but “the windows of heaven were opened.” The windows of heaven were opened; now this is an expression unique in Scripture in the sense that it occurs only here and in special occasions elsewhere. I mention this because I have heard in college and so on, some ignorant college professor getting up and saying that in the Bible people believed in a flat earth and they believed the sky was a great dome overhead, and believed that rain came through windows in heaven, that there were holes up there in the top of the dome an water poured through. Now if you trace this back in history you find nowhere in the Old Testament they believed this because you can find many, many other verses…I happen to be a meteorologist by background and so this is a subject of particular interest to me and therefore I checked this out and when you check it you just have to take a concordance and spend a couple of hours and look this up and you will find that they believe rain came from clouds, believed in the precipitation cycle explained in the book of Ecclesiastes, and had a great knowledge and awareness of these things by observation, very keen observers and they didn’t believe any such nonsense such as a flat earth and the canopy theory of the…there was just a dome, in other words, overhead.

This is simply a model that was worked out by an Italian by the name of Schiaparelli and I think in the 16^th or 17^th century and he thought the Bible taught this and so ever since then people have blissfully quoted Schiaparelli’s model, not even knowing where it came from. But if you examine, for example, The International Bible Encyclopedia, ISBE, and look up “windows of heaven” I think you’ll see where they trace it back to Schiaparelli and this is significant because it shows once again that most people who criticize the Bible have very little direct contact with the text of Scripture.

Now to return to the subject at hand, “the windows of heaven,” in Isaiah 24:18 we read, and remember now, this is a story of the tribulation, this is a prophecy of the great tribulation, “And it shall come to pass, that he who flees from the noise of the fear shall fall into the pit, and he that comes up out of the midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare; for the windows from on high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake. [19] The earth is utterly broken down; the earth is thoroughly dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly.” You can see then that the sounds of the windows of heaven being opened in not just simply a summer thunder storm. The windows of heaven opened are always a sign of God’s judgment, a sign of something special. So back in Genesis 7:11 and 8:2 when we say “the windows of heaven” were opened, this is not just simply rain, this is special divine judgment from heaven. And some have suggested that what this is is a collapse of a canopy of water vapor and I think this has much merit to it.

Now another detail which I think we should notice is the lack of rain before the flood. Turn to Genesis 2:5-6; it says, “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. [6] But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” Now the word “mist” there is a debatable word, it’s a tough word because it occurs so infrequently and a Semitic scholar by the name of E. A. Speiser who has written The Anchor Bible Commentary in Genesis, suggested a while ago in Scholarly Journal that the word “mist” here means a water of a well oozing up through the ground. It was used, of course, in the postdiluvian era and in the Babylonian civilization to refer to the delta land of the Tigris-Euphrates River system and in these delta lands the water would ooze up through the sand and they would call these things aid, which is the same word for mist, and so one could say ’ed so one could say therefore that the word ’ed seems to not refer to mist so much here as it refers to water oozing up through the ground. And this evidently is how…sort of like a vast underground sprinkling system that God had for the flood and would explain the luxuriant growth of vegetation.

However, if you turn in your Bible to Genesis 9:13-14, you read a strange thing. “I do set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. [14] And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud.” Now there’s something said here, and also look at Genesis 8:22, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” You get the definite impression from these two evidences that the precipitation after the flood was something new.

This would give, interestingly enough, an added dimension to Noah’s ministry because you see what the man was preaching was that God was going to judge the world by a flood, and rain was going to fall from heaven, and of course, if it’s true that there was no rain in the antediluvian time period, then you get the impression that Noah had quite a job before him because he had to convince the people that God would judge by a mechanism that they were not familiar with. So you can just imagine the people saying oh Noah, ha-ha, it’s never rained before, it’s not going to rain. Just like for example, we have the same problem convincing people of the Second Advent, God is going to judge by fire, but God never has judged by fire before, it’s something new, it’s some phenomena out beyond our personal experience and it sort of has to be taken by faith. And I think this adds interesting dimension to Noah’s message.

But the point to reflect upon in Genesis 2:5-6; Genesis 9:13-14 and Genesis 8:22 is that there are two, actually three factors here that are physically interrelated, and yet our text links not related. There is the first factor in Genesis 2:5-6 that seems to deny normal precipitation cycle existing before the flood…seems to deny, doesn’t prove it but it seems to suggest it. However, when you combine Genesis 2:5-6 with the observation of Genesis 9:13-14 you begin to notice clouds mentioned, never mentioned before. You begin to notice a rainbow. Now it is interesting that in order to produce a full spectrum rainbow you have to have droplets of over three tenths of a millimeter in diameter. If you have water droplets suspended in air less than three tenths of a millimeter in diameter you can get some optical phenomenon but you will not get a full spectrum rainbow. It’s also interesting to compare this diameter droplet, three tenths of a millimeter, with the diameter droplet necessary to cause rain. And in order to have rain occur you have to have a droplet approximately five tenths of a millimeter in diameter. So it seems therefore that the phenomenon of the rainbow, described in Genesis 9:13-14, if it is new phenomenon would teach that before Genesis 9:13-14 you did not have droplets large enough suspended in the air to cause rain. And this would compare very favorably with Genesis 2:5-6 which says it didn’t rain either.

In other words, we have two observations here and we can check them out physically because they are related. If there were no droplets in the air to cause a rainbow then there was no rain; and if there was no rain then there was no rainbow; the two phenomena go together. The third factor to relate to this is Genesis 8:22 where there are no seasons. See, if there were seasons before the flood evidently they were irregular. But here’s the first mention of seasons. It doesn’t prove…it doesn’t prove there weren’t seasons before the flood, it suggests there weren’t seasons before the flood. But again, if there were such things as seasons occurring for the first time after the flood you would have temperature differences, horizontally and vertically throughout the atmosphere and it’s precisely these temperature differences, horizontally and vertically throughout the atmosphere, that are necessary for the precipitations cycle to occur.

So it seems to me we have three observations in the Bible, Genesis 2:5-6, no rain; Genesis 9:13-14, rainbow first occurring after the flood; and Genesis 8:22, temperature differences in the atmosphere occurring first after the flood. If all these three things are taken together they strongly suggest something radical happened in the climate. Now this doesn’t prove a global flood, it simply suggests there was a tremendous global catastrophe that accompanied the flood.

Now one further factor on this fourth area, that supplements the argumentation, occurs in Genesis 10:25 and for the listener of this tape to appreciate the force of Genesis 10:25 it would be necessary for you to take a graph paper, a piece of graph paper and when we gave this series to our teenagers we required that each teenager draw the data from Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 on a piece of graph paper in the following way. Taking a piece of graph paper take the X axis to be the generation, the first generation would be Adam, and then Seth and so on, on down to Noah, and then Noah’s sons, etc. etc. etc., all the way down to the end of the data of Genesis 11. So you use for your data for the graph Genesis 5 and Genesis 11. And then on the Y axis of the graph put years from zero to a thousand. So your first division would be 100 years, 200 years, 300 years and so on, all the way up to a thousand. So your Y axis is the age the man was when he died. And your X axis is the generation in which the man lived. Then carefully plot the points from Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 out on your graph, and you’ll notice that before the flood you can draw a line of best fit nearly horizontal through the 930 mark, so that during the pre-flood time the average life span of the antediluvians was 930 years. But something happens right after the flood. After the flood you have a rapid decrease in age, all the way down to the end of Genesis 11 and if you want to extend the data further you can pick up ages of Abraham, you can pick up ages of Moses and David and examine the rest of the historical books of Scripture for ages and you can make your graph all the way out to the time of David.

If you will do this you will see that you get a decay curve that starts at the time of the flood and asymptotes or gradually approaches a seventy year line, which is exactly what Psalm 90 says, that man’s length of time on earth is 70 years and it’s very interesting that man’s age decreased like this. Now I’ve heard some people say that the problem is that they’ve changed calendars, they used a different mode of reckoning of time before the flood and after the flood, but the only trouble with this is, if you just take time to plot this graph out, that you’ll notice that if they changed calendars you would expect a strong discontinuity, in other words you’d expect a straight line at 930 before the flood, a straight line of 70 after the flood, but you wouldn’t expect a gradual transition occurring over generation after generation, you’d expect a sudden shift in the data. So the lack of sudden shift in the data seems to knock out the idea of a calendar.

A further thing that knocks out the idea of a different mode of reckoning of time is if you will also plot the age at which they gave birth to the Messianic seed and you’ll see that if you scale down the antediluvians, in other words, make 930 antediluvian years equal to 70 postdiluvian years then you come out with a ridiculous thing of having 8 year olds bearing children before the flood. It seems to me that the data of Genesis 5-11 is real data and the characteristics that you get when you draw this graph is very significant. Those of us who work in physics or chemistry should immediately recognize, this curve very much resembles an exponential decay curve; in fact I had a friend of mine who worked this out on semi-log rhythmic paper and proved that it is an exponential decay curve. And this would suggest by its very nature that what you have here is a transition from equilibrium to another equilibrium. In other words there was an age equilibrium of 930 years before the flood and then you have a second equilibrium of 700 years after the flood.

Now there is one further feature of this graph which you want to notice. I think I’ll save this other item in Genesis 10:25 for later on for the date, when we deal with the date of the flood. But let’s just terminate our discussion with the extent of the flood with the graph, observing it, and asking ourselves the question, what factors could cause such a fantastic decrease in the longevity of the human race? Of course you might say well, was this truly representative of the human race, aren’t you taking, for example, the fact that this is only the Messianic line that lived this long, could the other people not have lived this long. There’s no data to support this because if you look in the rest of Scripture and example people, for example, contemporaneous with Abraham, contemporaneous with Moses, contemporaneous with David, people out of the direct Messianic line, you will find their ages correspond very, very closely to David, to Moses, and to Abraham. These men aren’t just living 70 years, Abraham lived far longer than 70 years and so did Moses. And you’ll find the contemporaries of their generation, mentioned in Scripture, also lived the same amount. So we have every reason under the sun to take this as representative data of the entire generation.

So we can ask our self the question, what would have caused such a drastic decline in the longevity of man? I would suggest three possible things, first a tremendous change in diet and you get a hint of this in Genesis 9:2-4 where God gives man meat for the first time. Before, evidently, the divinely authorized means of feeding yourself was vegetarianism, even though possibly men did eat meat. Now why would there be a change in diet? I rather suspect it is because in the antediluvian world there was a tremendous luxuriant growth of vegetation; in the postdiluvian world you have very little, or very much impoverished vegetation and so man, to survive, must survive on protein somehow and so therefore he gets his protein now from eating animals.

A second factor which may have caused this drastic decline of longevity would be a change in the composition of the atmosphere. I have read, for example, in Patten’s book, The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epics, Patten, although I disagree with much of Patten, does bring out an observation where men have checked ozone, exposed living cells to ozone and found that if ozone was increased you’d get exactly this decline in viability. So this may be a factor, a change in the composition of the air which we breathe.

And a third possibility is an increase in background radiation; various background radiations and so on may cause declined longevity.

Well, all of these things, the earthquakes, the windows in heaven, the rainbows and the decline in longevity suggest to me that the flood was accompanied by a vast global cataclysm and the kind of cataclysm you would expect if the flood were truly global. So I think these, while they do not prove directly that the flood was global in extent, they do prove that the flood was accompanied by tremendous phenomena, phenomena which would suggest a global catastrophe.

Now these arguments have dealt with the extent of the flood and I would like to close off this section by estimating the time of the flood or the date of the flood. Now the date of the flood is directly related to the problem of the genealogies of Genesis 5, Genesis 10 and Genesis 11. Are there gaps or aren’t there gaps in these genealogies. Obviously there’s no direct way of telling because we have no comparative list to check them by; we have only analogy to go from other genealogical literature.

Now as far as the need for gaps to produce population, there is no need for a gap between the flood and say, Abraham’s time which is about 2000 BC. There is no need of a gap to account for the vast population in Abraham’s day, for if you will compute the population by pairs from Noah onward to Abraham, by Abraham’s time you have 53,000,000 people, which is about the population of the Near East today. The reason why this population explodes so rapidly in the post-flood generations is because of the fact you have none of them dying. You see, Noah would almost be living down to the time of Abraham if this were true, if there were no gaps in the genealogy, so that the population mushrooms very rapidly. And therefore there is no need to posit a gap because of the need for developing enough people to populate the world in Abraham’s time.

However, there are other problems and one of them is Genesis 10:25, here we read: “And unto Eber were born two sons; the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.” It’s interesting that if you read down through Genesis 10 you have kind of a boring repetition, so and so began so and so and so and so begat so and so and so and so happened and so on, until you get to Genesis 10:25 and you get this strange notice that the earth was divided in the days of Peleg.

Now if you go back to the graph you notice something very peculiar. It turns out that Eber, and when you go from the generation of Eber to the generation of Peleg there’s a discontinuity in that decay curve. In other words, the curve starts the decay from 930 and gradually asymptotes to 70 years, and if you’ll draw the curve out you’ll find problems in the curve just at the point you transition from Eber to Peleg, the curve tends to break and a friend of mine has shown on semi-log paper that there are actually two decay curves; one exists before Eber and the other exists after Peleg, and something happened in the generation of Peleg and Eber. And it’s interesting that mathematically in the list, totally independent of Genesis 10:25 we suspect something happened there. And then lo and behold, when we go over to independent data in Genesis 10 we discover this strange notice occurring in Genesis 10:25. This suggests that something happened here or there’s a gap in the genealogy.

At first glance one would expect that there was a catastrophe that happened here. I haven’t really come to a solid conclusion whether this shows there is a gap or whether it shows that there was a sudden drastic decline within one generation on the longevity. I would suspect it would be…on one hand I would say that there is just a discontinuity due to some catastrophe that occurred in this era, and because of the fact that you have two different decay curves, either side of this point on your graph paper. And if this is true it seems to suggest that there was a catastrophe rather than a gap in the genealogy because of that curve. On the other hand, and this would support the idea of a gap, in Genesis 10:25 you have the statement, “in his days the earth was divided.” And that phrase in the Hebrew, “in his days,” usually refers to an era of rule, so that the one personality, Peleg here, dominated the world scene “in his days.” So you have the problem here, if there is no gap in the genealogy, then why do you have the phrase “in his days” in verse 25 because it would be meaningless. All the other patriarchs would be living in Peleg’s day, and if all the other patriarchs were living in Peleg’s time, the notice “in his days” seems to lose its force. So the fact that you have the phrase “in his days” in verse 25 suggests that only Peleg is dominate in his day, that is, it’s a day in which Peleg is dominate and all the other patriarchs are not. But if all the patriarchs are not dominant, why aren’t they, because they are all existing if there are no gaps in the genealogy. So this suggests that there probably is a gap in the genealogy at this point.

And of course, finally, another argument for some gaps in the genealogy is the fact that you have tremendous trouble, synthesizing a flood of, say 2500 BC with existing archeological records that go back before that time. And this is not to say that archeological records aren’t true, later on we’ll find out that archeological records have a tremendous problem meshing with carbon 14 dating. For example, Libby, when he test’s carbon 14 on Egyptian chronology and tests it on non-Egyptian chronology comes out with two different things, suggesting that Egyptian chronology and non-Egyptian chronology have not thoroughly synchronized. So archeological records aren’t all that important but nevertheless they are something that has to be explained and I do not know how to explain, at the present time, how they can be true without having at least some gaps in the post-flood genealogy.

Now we come to the fact, all right, suppose there are gaps; how many are there? Well, the only way we can tell is by analogy with other genealogical literature. If you turn to Matthew 1 we find a famous genealogy, the genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have two items to consider in Matthew 1; the first is what is the maximum gap in years in the genealogies, and it’s in Matthew 1:1, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Now I’m not totally convinced by this, some people think that this is proof of gap; “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And of course there are gaps of approximately a thousand years between Jesus Christ and David and a thousand years between David and Abraham. But I’m not all that convinced that verse 1 is actually part of the genealogical listing. I rather suspect that the genealogical listing begins in verse 2; that Matthew 1:1 is not a true genealogy, rather what Matthew 1:1 is is a title of Jesus Christ. He is Jesus the Christ, Jesus the son of David, Jesus the son of Abraham. And I think that that is not intended to be a genealogical statement, it’s intended to be a title of our Lord.

But nevertheless, suppose it is part of the genealogical listing, again leaning over backwards for the sake of our critics. Even this provides only one thousand years and this is the longest gap you can find in any genealogy at any point in God’s Word. So therefore by analogy with the rest of Scripture the maximum gap occurring in genealogy is one thousand years. And so if we are to have a gap every other generation, the genealogical listing back in Genesis 5 and through 11, still we could only force Adam back to 21,000 BC and not anywhere near the one million BC figure needed by modern anthropology. So if there are those gaps, we have no evidence whatever from other Scripture. We have no evidence whatever that the writers of genealogical literature thought in terms of such massive gaps. Even in Matthew 1:1 which itself is a suspect situation, you never have such a long kind of gap. To get one million year dating out of the Genesis 5 and 11 data it would require 20 gaps of 50,000 years or more. And if there’s a person mentioned and then a 50,000 year gap, another person mentioned and a 50,000 year gap, you quickly wonder what the meaning of the genealogy is.

Now another feature to look at in genealogical listing is the frequency of gaps. What is the maximum frequency of gaps; we dealt with the duration of the length of the gap, but what about the frequency of the gap in the genealogical listings. Well, in Matthew 1 you only have two gaps, one in verse 8 and one in verse 11, and you have 14 generations listed in Matthew 1. So out of 14 generations you only have two gaps and those gaps are only one generation in duration. So therefore you come to the conclusion on the basis of genealogical data that when a genealogical table was written by the authors of Scripture, the authors of Scripture intended to give the broad outline, and if they did skip a generation here and there, those skips are few and far between and the skips that are made are minor in length.

Therefore our conclusion is that to be very conservative in allowing gaps in the genealogy, some of them may be there but on the other hand, one can’t use the gap as the panacea for all problems; it’s rather dishonest to use gaps to think that you can get out from under all the problems by just simply putting gaps all over the genealogy.

So this concludes the argument for the date of the flood. I would conclude that the minimum date of the flood, the nearest date that’s allowed if there are no gaps in the genealogies, would be about 2500 BC. The oldest date for the flood allowed would be approximately 10,000 BC. So somewhere the flood occurred on the best of Scriptural exegesis we can have, somewhere between 2500 BC and 10,000 BC. And as far as Adam’s date is concerned, if there were no gaps in the genealogy we arrive at a date to Ussher and many of the other chronologists, 4000 BC, but if there were gaps in the genealogies then Adam could be as far back as 20,000 BC. But to say the flood is before 10,000 BC or Adam before 20,000 BC is to make an interpretation of the genealogical literature utterly without parallel at any other point of Scripture. And I’m always suspicious of interpretations which require an unique hermeneutic at any given point, or a unique rule of interpretation just for this particular passage. It’s far, far more objective and safer to control your interpretation by other passages of Scripture.

Now we’ve covered and summarized the six problems of the Bible and with this we conclude the block of material on the Scriptures and their bearing on creation and from now on we are going to move into the area of the scientific problems that are encountered, that Christians feel in tension with. And as we conclude this section and begin to move to another section I want to summarize by giving a Biblical framework that one can draw, and this is the Biblical framework which we get from Scripture.

If we take a long piece of paper and draw a line from left to right and we have the right most point be Abraham, and we label that point 2000 BC, for this is approximately the time of Abraham, and then we label the left most point the creation of angels, then we have the basic framework of primal history outlined. As we said earlier, starting from the left we work rightward; our first point is the creation of the angels. And our second point just after that you can indicate a second point to the right of the left most point and that would be the creation of the core of the planet of the earth. Then you would have the third point, the fall of Satan. Then the fourth point, the creation of the seas, the covering of the seas, according to Job 38. Then the fifth point would be the creation of the sixth day, here’s where the heavens and the earth and the entire universe was established as a functioning system. Then after the seven days, a later point, you would have the curse, the beginning of death in animals and man. And this point we would label between 20,000 BC and 4000 BC. The midway across the paper you would label the flood, between 10,000 and 2500 BC. And then further on to the right you would have the Tower of Babel, the division of the earth in the days of Peleg, and here you have a linguistic fracture, the beginning of different cultures and so on; possibly a division of physical significance in the earth. And then you have Abraham and this framework, therefore, is the framework given to us in God’s Word for earth history between Genesis 1 and 11. Now of course to the left of the point for the seven days there’s no time as we’ve indicated before, so your time actually begins with whatever point you let equal the creation of six days and extends rightward to the point of Abraham, 2000 BC.

So this, therefore, concludes our block of material on Genesis, and next time we will deal with the scientific problems and begin to work, within this framework that we have got by exegesis of Scripture.