Are you talking about the Zanclean flood? If so, it would seem to be a few million years too early to be a candidate.
The operative here is “remain flooded”. That doesn’t work, because the flood subsided.
Nonsense. Nobody would say, even in Florida, that a hill 23 feet tall was “high”. You are stretching the text beyond recognition.
Have you? Are there any high hills there? None of your attempted examples fit the text. And of course we’re supposedly talking about Mesopotamia, right? There is no evidence of a flood ever covering anything more than small areas. Nothing lasting a year, nothing supporting an ark or the other details of the flood story. I imagine Noah and his boat sitting in the middle of a pond while his neighbors scratch their heads.
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The cited Chapter 10 at creation.com really is worth a read. I marvel at some of the arguments because they appear to be oblivious even to basic fundamentalist theology. Here’s one of my personal favorites, among the lamest of Creation.com arguments:
If the Flood were local, why did Noah have to build an Ark? He
could have walked to the other side of the mountains and escaped.
Travelling just 20 km per day, Noah and his family could have travelled over 3,000 km in six months. God could have simply warned Noah to flee, as He did for Lot in Sodom.
Why did Noah have to build an ark? Because God told him to!
The creation.com argument is like asking:
Why did God command Moses to go through a long process of appearances before Pharaoh and such a long series of plagues upon Israel when God could have simply led the Children of Israel out of Egypt without all of the delay? (Answer: because it was God’s will. Fundamentalists believe that God has his purposes in all that he does and that how he accomplishes those things are lessons meant to teach us.)
Why did Joshua lead the people to march around Jericho each day and then march around it seven times on the last day? Why didn’t God simply smite the city without all that extra work? Indeed, why did God bother with having the Children of Israel leave their tents at all?
And for that matter, why did Noah have to build an ark when God could have simply caused a stroke in every sinner he wanted to kill? The flood was totally unnecessary! Isn’t it interesting that creation.com knows better than God what he ought to do in a given situation? In any other context they would be arguing, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways.”
Apparently creation.com thinks that pragmatics should determine what God does and doesn’t do.
Of course, in any other context, every fundamentalist preacher I’ve ever known is quick to point out that God chose to send a flood and command Noah to build an ark because that ark is a type of Christ. That’s why the New Testament teaches that Jesus Christ is “the ark of our salvation.” If Noah and family had simply left the area, there would have been no type of Christ through the ark.
Indeed, even when I was a YEC global flood advocate long ago, I always winced at this lame “If the flood was local, why didn’t Noah and family simply leave the area to avoid the flood?”
Of course, the creation.com chapter 10 is filled with arguments just as weak, embarrassing, and unbiblical as this one. (Indeed, in other contexts they speak of the ark as a type of Christ, so they don’t even think through the consistency of their own arguments!)
Wow. This gives me flashbacks of the factors which led me out of the “creation science” community. The creation.com chapter plays the usual game of accusing their Christian critics of “abandoning the clear texting of scripture” in favor of evolutionary science—when it was actually the Bible itself which led so many of us out of our tradition-based Young Earth Creationism.
So hills cease to be hills if they “remain flooded.” Got it.
But the text is in Hebrew, not English, so your English-based attempt at exegesis is irrelevant and heading into the pointless. I’m out.
Meanwhile, even this debate tangent is another reminder that Peaceful Science is NOT an echo chamber.
More obfuscation. Obviously God told him to for a good practical reason, not just to make a vague theological point that would have been lost on most everybody at the time. Can you imagine the embarrassment of Noah trying to save all the birds and land animals from a tiny local flood they could have simply walked away from?
Is this really your view of Christ? A silly and totally unnecessary “salvation” from a danger that can be simply avoided on our own power? You have refuted yourself.
You’re always very eager to remind everybody that you used to be a YEC. But here it’s clear you’ve probably never really understood the arguments to begin with. What you used to believe is not of any importance to anybody, but what you are making abundantly clear is that you’ve got an emotional axe to grind against the biblical worldview in general.
Just a reminder PD you still need to explain this with your Flood scenario. 
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What a great hand-waving word! Everything can be dismissed as “obfuscation.” (You remind me of John Macarthur. Whenever he is overwhelmed by careful exegesis, he effortlessly dismisses it as “hermeneutical gymnastics” and fails to meaningfully engage the arguments.)
Is it a “vague theological point” when creation.com makes the very same point about the ark of Noah being a type of Christ?? (As in Noahs Ark and salvation, for example. AIG makes the very same “vauge” point: Our “Ark” of Salvation | Kids Answers )
Is it a “vague theological point” when 1 Peter 3:20-21 also makes the very same point? (If you don’t read Koine Greek, look up the meaning of ἀντίτυπος, ANTITYPOS.)
PDP, I must say that you have managed to absolutely astound me! (It seems that of the two of us, I’m the more fundamental fundamentalist. I wouldn’t have expected that.)
Really? So in this case God is being practical. Are you suggesting that a global flood is the most practical means of addressing the sin of Adamic people in Noah’s ERETZ? Interesting. (So when the angel of the Lord slew 185,000 Assyrians in their camp overnight, he was being impractical??)
I have never heard anyone put a practical slant on Isaiah 55:8-9. This is definitely a first.
Yes. I agree with 1 Peter 3 in every detail. Your disagreement is absolutely astounding me!
I thought I had encountered just about every YEC argument on the ERETZ (in your “planet earth” sense.) But you are the very first YEC I’ve encountered who defies the very ark of our salvation concept which both creation.com and AIG embrace, as is common among Bible-affirming Christ-followers nearly universally. Not just fundamentalists.
Now THAT is a brand new kind of argument! (Not really. You are astounding me again. This is bordering on a barrage of cliches. It is as if you are following a script, the kind that telemarketers use. When they don’t have a substantive answer to a question or challenge, they go back to their script and talking-points—whether they are relevant or not.)
So, you are also going to embrace the old cliche that anybody who doesn’t agree with your own personal hermeneutics is opposed to “the biblical worldview in general.” And you accuse them of being “emotional”. Fascinating.
It is ironic that you resort to this tactic even while defying a basic doctrine of scripture (the Noahic ark as a type of Christ, making Jesus Christ the ark of our salvation) and replacing what the Bible actually states with a collection of traditions and arguments which are rooted in the Seventh Day Adventist teachings of prophetess Ellen White and her friend George Mcready Price. Yes, you are bringing back a flood of memories.
Nevertheless, I will certainly admit that you are very original, even when following what is mostly a traditional script. You’ve given me some new nuggets for my archives.
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You’re being obtuse. Hills at the bottom of the sea don’t fit the story. The flood ended.
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The flood events certainly ended for Noah when he disembarked. (Of course, the ark probably drifted in the wind quite a few miles in the course of a year. We don’t assume that he built the ark in the hill country of Ararat.) The text doesn’t claim that all bodies of water everywhere dried up when Noah disembarked.
Glenn Morton was okay with that, since he put the Garden and Adam in the Pliocene. But it’s not only too early, it doesn’t fit the text in many ways, most obvious being that the flood has to cover the place where the Ark lands, and it then has to recede. The Mediterranean just filled up and stayed that way.
I can’t believe you intend any of that as a serious argument. I could be wrong about that, but I have developed a certain amount of respect for you powers of reason, and I would hate to abandon that entirely. So, did you intend any of that as a serious response?
Yes, hermeneutical gymnastics is an apt description of what you’re trying to do here.
I suppose I should not be surprised that if you’re willing to twist Scripture, you’ll think nothing of twisting my own words as well. I never said that Christ is not typified by the Ark. In fact, my entire point hinges of the fact that He is.
A tiny local flood which could be easily escaped without the help of an Ark makes the Ark into a sham, and destroys the significance of the typology. If the flood was local, then it does not typify God’s judgment on the world, which is universal. If the Ark was not needed for survival, but was just a setpiece in a moral play that God decided to put on, then it does not meaningfully represent Christ, whose salvation is very much practical and necessary.
I didn’t say that the Flood was the only possible way God could have chosen to act. I said that God’s instructions to Noah were practical and needed, not impractical and senseless with respect to the goal they were purported to be addressing, namely, escaping harm from the Flood. God’s judgment was universal because the corruption of sin, as well as the genetic corruption stemming from the actions of the fallen angels in creating the Nephilim, were universal, excepting only Noah and his family.
I agree with 2 Peter 3 in every detail, and this kind of nonsense is exactly what Peter prophesied about.
I think so, yes. In fact, you’re so emotional that you’re being forced to totally misconstrue nearly every word I have to say to you.
And I didn’t claim that you did. Why don’t you read the portion of my post that you yourself quoted before claiming that I am misquoting you. Ironic.
Where does the Genesis text say that the Nephilim were created by “the fallen angels”? That’s another tradition that you have imposed upon the text.
I agree. And that is a different claim than the alleged global scope of the flood.
So you’re saying that anyone who interprets 2 Peter 3 differently from your favorite YEC traditions is not only wrong but is someone who scoffs at the promise of Christ’s return. That is sad, misrepresenting what I wrote, and sounding very much like slandering a Christ-follower who happens to disagree with your traditions.
Ironic. I will leave your assessment to the reader as an exercise. Did I scoff at Christ’s return? Did I deny anything within the 2 Peter 3 text? No.
Please look into the tu quoque fallacy.
What exactly makes you think he didn’t warn the whole earth? I do think he did - you only think he didn’t because you don’t think the flood is global.
Jesus’ point is that Noah’s flood was a global judgment. When Jesus returns the same will be true.
Notice my point about “under heaven,” and we could probably argue about hermaneutics all day.
But also I gave you a perfectly nice argument why the writer of Genesis would have been aware of a global earth, but in our prejudice we think we have exceptional scientific knowledge. Because in your interviews you did not say the plain meaning of the text is that’s it’s local; you said it couldn’t be global because the writer couldn’t have known there was a globe.
You did not respond to it.
For example, I was hoping you’d engage in the following:
Explain why Sargon would boast about circumnavigating the globe 4 times. If it was a lie or an exaggeration, he would have said he did it once. For him to say he did so 4 times means that he knew others observed it.
Perhaps repeat it here. I’m not aware of any evidence they knew of Australia or the Americas.
Imagine if we discovered there are intelligent alien civilizations on a planet X in a neighboring galaxy that have been there for thousands of years. Would one then infer that Genesis meant to say that the “flood” not only covered planet Earth, but also planet X?
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Or, better yet, we could save ourselves a lot of time and simply look up SHAMAYIM/HASHAMAYIM in a Hebrew lexicon and discover that it didn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. “Under the sky” is simply a description of human experience under the dome which the peoples of the Ancient Near East assumed “covered” the disk of land which extended to the horizon in all directions. (It is typically described in textbooks as an upside-down bowl covering a dinner plate.) HASHAMAYIM doesn’t imply something which extended to the entire atmosphere of planet earth or somehow carried a global meaning.
I’m usually the one who encourages people not to underestimate ancient peoples but in this case you are pontificating without any evidence to support your claim.
Oh my. I can’t help but think that (1) you’ve never consulted a lexicon for the meaning of the word circumnavigate, and that (2) you’ve never actually read the Sargon of Akkade birth legend, or else you would know that he only spoke of circumnavigating (sailing around) the “sea-lands.”
Here is the relevant text:
Let him ascend all the high mountains!
27. [Let him traverse all the foothills]!
28. Let him circumnavigate the sealands three times!
29. [Let Dilmun submit to him (?)]!
30. [Let him ascend to the Great Wall of Heaven and Earth (?)]!
31. [Let him remove (its) stones . . .]!
If memory serves, that text comes from a cuneiform in the British Museum. Notice that much of it is difficult to read, and therefore most of the translation is in square brackets. But line 28 is not in brackets because it is fairly clear: “Let him circumnavigate the sea-lands three times.”
Nothing is said about “circumnavigating the globe” as you claim. There is no mention of a globe or spherical planet earth at all. It should not be surprising that so many of the ancients realized that no matter what direction they travelled on land, they would eventually reach a coast. So they could also easily imagine circumnavigating — sailing completely around — that land mass and any islands in those waters.
Circumnagivation can be applied to circumnavigating the entire planet as Magellan did but it also applies to circumnavigating the Mediterranean Sea (visiting many of the key ports along the way) and circumnavigating the islands of Japans as submarines did during WWII.
Yes, you have totally misrepresented what the Sargon of Akkade text says. Some claim that the Vikings were the first to circumnavigate Great Britain. Would you thereby claim that the Vikings circumnavigated the globe?
Explain it? Ancient kings and their fans boasted about all sorts of things. (Indeed, ancient mythology is full of such boasts.) However, I have never heard anyone claim that lies and exaggerations were stated only once while those which were repeated four times must have been actual events observed by others. I am dumbfounded by this claim. (Do I really need to dispute this? Did ancient kings truly care if their boasts had been observed? Even present day politicians make boasts about incredible deeds which have never been observed! Some of them even claim to be better experts than the scientists. But that’s another topic for another day.)
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That’s what I’ve been thinking. If people are willing to extend “land” to mean “the globe of the earth”, including Australia and Tasmania, then I see no reason to not also extend it to Venus (in the hypothetical case that we find signs of intelligent life there), or even other galaxies. After all, Australia was just as inaccessible and far to the ancient Hebrews as Venus is for us today. And that, to me, is a sign that this hermeneutical move is anachronistic.
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We differ in these regards. I accept your claim to be a Christ-follower who tries to respect what God has revealed in his scriptures and in his creation—even if I don’t always observe you being consistent in that regard. I simply notice that some of your positions are more about tradition than text. I certainly don’t believe that that is somehow worse than someone saying they don’t believe the text at all.
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It would be desirable and more peaceful if for the purposes of discussion both sides would avoid repeating the point that they think the other side is “twisting Scripture” or doubting core Christian beliefs. While it may reflect one’s truthful opinion, I don’t think repeating this kind of rhetoric in every response results in anything but more acrimony and division within the church.
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