Table of Contents:
A world wide extermination
The horror of the Biblical flood and the massive destruction it caused is often not understood.
Everything was exterminated.
In the Bible it tells us that:
Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out;
Genesis 7:23
men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth.”
Noah needed to build a boat that could withstand the flood waters.
How large was the Ark and could he have built it?
‘Wiped out’ and ‘wiped’ in the original Hebrew is interesting.
It is the word ‘machah’ which literally means “to be wiped out, to be blotted out, to be exterminated”.
That is what has happened to the early fossil record – they have been exterminated! That is the horror of the Biblical flood!
The waters and rocks crashing around would have physically dismembered the corpses, there would have been constant abrasion from the sediments, chemical decomposition would have reduced them even further and surviving marine predators would have torn at the bodies.
All of this left no trace of the land-dwelling, air-breathing creatures and animals in the fossil record at that time.
Every living thing that moved on the earth perished –
Genesis 7:21-22
birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.
Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.”
This is how Noah’s Flood started
all the springs of the great deep* burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens** were opened.
Genesis 7:11-12 [* springs below the oceans] [** the sky]
And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.”
The subterranean water bursting up from deep below the ocean floor was the springs of the great deep.
The torrential rain pouring down was the floodgates of the heavens opening.
The waters bursting out from the earth was possibly super-heated, and there were probably massive earthquakes and volcano′s, and rapid continental movements which caused unimaginable destruction.
The land surfaces were totally destroyed and levelled.
The heat that was produced would have formed the metamorphic rocks.
The Bible describes the flood as a sudden event
The greatest destruction occurred in the first 40 days:
For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark* high above the earth.
Genesis 7:17-20 [* The ark was the huge wooden boat that Noah built for himself and the animals.]
The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.
They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.
The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.”
See the discussion on where Noah’s Ark actually grounded and why Mt Ararat?
See a flood timeline from God’s warning to when the land had dried completely.
See more thoughts on Noah’s flood.
‘The high mountains’ would probably have been lower than the ones today.
Some scientists believe that the Mountain ranges were pushed up shortly after this event – if we date it in the early Cambrian.
After this initial destruction the flood waters started to recede
Five months after the flood hit.
The water receded steadily from the earth.
Genesis 8:3-5
At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.”
Just over 9 months after the flood hit
The vegetation started to regrow:
He (Noah) waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.
Genesis 8:10-12
When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf!
Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.
He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.”
See an article on Noah releasing a raven and a dove – the dove returns but the raven doesn’t, surprisingly there is a message in that for us.
The ground looked dry ten and a half months after the flood hit
By the first day of the first month of Noah′s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth.
Genesis 8:13
Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.”
But because the ground looked dry to Noah, the Lord knew that the ground at lower levels would still be very boggy and plants hadn’t regrown enough.
One year and ten days from the flood hitting
The earth was dry enough to walk on and plants had regrown to support the animals moving away from the Ark:
By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.
Genesis 8:14-17
Then God said to Noah,
‘Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.
Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you – the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground, so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it.’ “
The Bible has described a world wide, catastrophic flood of unimaginable proportions.
The ‘Great Unconformity’ and geochemical evidence
Some experts think that there is evidence of a world wide flood – the geological confirmation of the horror of the Biblical flood.
In different parts of the world there is a vast erosion layer that mainstream geologists cannot explain:
Of the many unconformities (gaps) observed in geological strata, the term Great Unconformity is frequently applied to either the unconformity observed by James Hutton in 1787 at Siccar Point in Scotland, or that observed by John Wesley Powell in the Grand Canyon in 1869.
‘Great_Unconformity’ Wikipedia [i]
Both instances are exceptional examples of where the contacts between sedimentary strata and either sedimentary or crystalline strata of greatly different ages, origins, and structure represent periods of geologic time sufficiently long to raise great mountains and then erode them away.”
On the Lunar and Planetary Institute website it describes the Great Unconformity as:
the gap in the rock record between Cambrian times (~550 million years ago) and the pre-Cambrian (anything earlier).
‘Grand Canyon – The Great Unconformity’ by the Lunar and Planetary Institute
An unconformity is a surface in the rock record, in the stratigraphic column, representing a time from which no rocks are preserved.
It could represent a time when no rocks were formed, or a time when rocks were formed but then eroded away.
Small unconformities are ubiquitous in the rock record — for instance, in the Coconino sandstone, every cross-bed surface represents a small unconformity.
The Great Unconformity is important for three reasons:
it represents a long span of time — 250 to 1200 million years in the Grand Canyon;
it is found nearly everywhere across the globe; and
it divides rocks with familiar fossils from those with no fossils or only fossil bacteria.”
Many geologists are restricted in their thinking because they base everything on having to be millions of years old to allow enough for things to evolve.
Why can’t this unexplainable erosion layer be caused by Noah’s Flood?
See this video: “Was the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon the start of the Global Flood?” by Dr. Steve Austin.
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It seems amazing that Noah and his family had to live on the Ark for over a year with all the noise, smell and lack of space but there is no record of them complaining!
Learn from Noah on how to please God.
What was the first thing Noah did after the Flood?
He let all the creatures go, then he built an altar from stones and sacrificed some of the additional ‘clean’ animals and thanked God for saving him and his family.
God then made a covenant with him saying he wouldn’t flood the whole Earth again and he created a sign in the sky to be a reminder – a rainbow, (basically a bow facing away from the Earth meaning that judgement was turned away).
Noah then planted some vines and when they had produced grapes he made some wine and became drunk.
He was so drunk that he lay naked in his tent and his son, Ham, laughed about it, but his other two sons, Shem and Japheth, wanted to protect their father’s dignity, so they walked backwards into Noah’s tent holding up a blanket to drape over him.
Noah then lived to a ripe old age.
How many years was between Adam and Noah?
Because the ages of the people living prior to the flood were so big, Adam died only 126 years before Noah was born.
There were 8 generations between Adam and Noah.
Therefore many of those generations knew each other and were in close proximity.
Here is the male line of Adam and their ages when they had their first born sons:
Adam 130 years old, Seth 105 yrs, Enosh 90 yrs, Kenan 70 yrs, Mahalalel 65 yrs, Javed 162 yrs, Enoch 65 yrs, Methuselah 187 yrs, Lamech 182 yrs and he fathered Noah.
References:
[i] ‘Great Unconformity’ Wikipedia.
[ii] ‘Grand Canyon – The Great Unconformity’ by the Lunar and Planetary Institute
I started on my Faith Journey in 1976 whilst on my sandwich year from college.
Since then I’ve not been restrained to any one denomination – believing that local Church is always important. Through career moves and life changes this has enabled me to play a part in the Assembly of God Church, Elim, various New Church Groupings, Brethren, Anglican and Baptist Churches.
I am married to Jackie and we live in Cambridgeshire in the UK.