Teaching the History of Noah

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I feel strongly, that we are doing our children a disservice when we use pictures like this one to tell them Bible "stories." And too often, the accompanying stories read like a fairy tale. Then, does it surprise us when they grow up to think the Bible is nonsense?

Children are smarter than we give them credit. If we teach them doctrine and history from the Bible, they will get it. They don't need cute pictures, they have imaginations. Realistic images give them plenty to go from. For example, little boys fall in love with pictures of realistic looking dinosaurs. Not coloring books with Barney and Baby Bop.

Hopefully this outline of the nitty gritty details of Noah and the global flood will help you share the true histories in the Bible in a more realistic way. I try hard to avoid relying on belief suspending, physics defying speculations.

This post will answer questions like:

* Is there evidence in geology of a universal flood? Yes!

* Can the ark really hold enough animals? Yes!

* Can rain alone really flood the entire earth? No.

* Was the flood really global? Yes!

The details in the Bible make it clear there was more to the flood than "40 days of rain." The catastrophe included earthquakes, tsunamis, sinking continents and more. The pre-flood civilization was all but erased. Just a memory.

The people before the flood had achieved a high level of civilization thanks to the Patriarchs, especially Enoch and his city of Zion. The rest of the world must have learned and imitated his achievements and founded great cities as well. The difference being they were wicked and envious of the city of Enoch. Repeated attempts were made to conquer Zion, however, each attempt ended in disaster for the aggressors. Enoch redirected rivers to wash away their armies or caused mountains to fall on them. After a while, they gave up and lived "afar off" in awe of their power.

After the city of Zion was translated, the remaining Patriarchs continued in their preaching until the time of Noah. At that point, it became so wicked that no attempts were made for higher civilization. The existing cities just survived and fortified. Man did evil continually and violence was everywhere. In this state, there was no point in planting and harvesting because other people would just come at the time of harvest and steal everything. People would sleep with their swords, but then awake to find their sword and been stolen.

Noah continued to preach repentance and the Lord continually protected him from the attempts on his life. At one point the Lord said enough is enough and commanded him to stop preaching and to build the ark, giving him the exact instructions of how to do this. He also built it in a high mountain valley, far away from any ocean. Can you imagine how ridiculous that seemed to the wicked people who watched him build a large boat so far from the ocean?

With the dimensions the Bible provides, there was plenty of room for a pair of every type of animal. Notice that I didn't say species. God didn't need to save every species. Only a pair from every genus. One pair of canines, for example, would have the variable DNA to give us all of the dogs of today, Chihuahuas to Great Danes, jackals to wolves.

And it is that much easier to fit all those types of animals when you realize they were all babies. Which would give them more years for offspring after the flood. Jewish tradition holds to this fact. And it also has a special place for those babies' parents, which I'll cover later.

So, there was two of every kind plus 14 of every clean animal. English speakers who grew up with the King James Version of the Bible are at a disadvantage - where it says "...of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens." I've watched people wonder over that curious odd number. But the original text, and pretty much every other translation of the Bible correctly translates it as "seven pairs." Now that makes sense. More food for Noah's family.

The time came for Noah to close up the ark and seal it tight, because the deluge had begun. Not only was it raining buckets, but the continents were sinking and the sea floors were rising. Think about it. If the earth's crust were uniformly flat, our planet would be 100% ocean. Because, on average, the oceans are deeper than the continents are high. 

So this should not be a stretch for the imagination. These devastating floods annihilated the cities along the coast and in the lower elevations. As the scriptures put it the "fountains of the great deep [were] broken up" (KJV) or "burst forth." (NIV) 

Jubilees 5:24-25
And the Lord opened seven flood-gates of heaven, And the mouths of the fountains of the great deep, seven mouths in number. (fountains of the great deep = ocean basins)
And the flood-gates began to pour down water from the heaven forty days and forty nights, And the fountains of the deep also sent up waters, until the whole world was full of water. (emphasis added)

The tectonic plates shifted violently during this catastrophe causing the continents to temporarily sink and the sea floors to rise. The "fountains of the great deep" truly did "burst forth" and wash away all life on land.

It took a full forty days for the flood waters
to reach where Noah had built the ark. 

"And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth." Building the ark in a high mountain valley makes sense now. If Noah had been on the coast, his boat would have been destroyed like all the ships of the seafarers at the time.

Forty days was a long time for the flood waters to reach the ark and lift it up. If you ponder that for a while, you'll might ask yourself this question. "As the wicked people saw the devastation and the rising waters, what kept them from grabbing axes and breaking into the ark?" Did the Lord guard the way with a pillar of fire? Maybe.

But Jewish tradition holds to a different solution. The animal parents who accompanied their babies to the ark, stayed outside and guarded the way. The love for and instincts for protecting their young made for a fierce barrier for any ill-advised human to try and breach.

During the long voyage, the passengers on the ark had to keep the windows and doors shut. The ark rode out the turbulent waves like a submarine at times. Hebrew tradition explains how they managed to see. "The ark was illuminated by a precious stone, the light of which was more brilliant by night than by day, so enabling Noah to distinguish between day and night."

I find this idea very curious, because if you know anything about the brother of Jared in the Book of Mormon, you may have

asked yourself, "Where did he get the idea to bring stones for the Lord to touch and give them light in the barges he built to sail to his promised land?"

Well, this explains it.

Living so recently after the flood, it must have been common knowledge that Noah had an artificial light in the way of a glowing stone. So when the brother of Jared and his people were asked to endure a similar ordeal, (i.e. cross the ocean in a dark vessel) that was the first thing he thought of, since it had been done before.

The rain continued and the flood waters rose for a full two months, at which time the cataclysm began to subside and the continents and sea floors began to rebound. Jubilees 5 says, "the fountains of the great deep were closed and the flood-gates of heaven were restrained; and . . . all the mouths of the abysses of the earth were opened, and the water began to descend into the deep below." (abysses = ocean basins) 

Can you picture the sea floors returning to their original state and the water rushing back into the deep? 

The flood waters covered the earth for five months, at which time, the ark rested on a mountain. But it took another three months before they could see the surrounding mountaintops emerge from the water, and another two before the earth had dried up enough to safely leave the ark. They were in that ark a full year and 10 days.

Today people are always drawn by the fanciful idea that the ark has been found in the Mountains of Ararat. However, why would we expect any trace of it to be left? I'm sure the people dismantled it and kept pieces of it as mementos. It was the Berlin Wall of their time. Besides, there is every indication that the ark didn't come to rest in those Turkish mountains anyway. Many corrected translations of Genesis 11:2 say that the people who settled Mesopotamia and decided to build the tower of Babel "journeyed from the east" based on the Hebrew for that passage implying the proposition "from" not "to." So it is more likely that the ark came to  rest on an east Asian mountain such as one found in a range like the Himalayas, Karakoram or Hindu Kush.

The cataclysm reshaped the planet. Mountain ranges, which were roughly around 6000 feet tall throughout the world, had risen to the heights we see today, with many over 10,000 feet. The continents were in completely new positions relative to each other. Oceans had changed size.

Until the 1800s, geologists studied all the proof that the earth had suffered a devastating, cataclysmic global flood. But then science turned it's back, consciously, on God and reinvented this world in man's image.

Since then, any obvious evidence of the flood was ignored or explained away to make room for the new dogma - undirected, chance evolution. They began to preach that this beautiful, complex world and all its life sprung from bubbly primordial soup in only 5 billion years. Wow! Now that takes a great deal of "faith" to believe in that miracle. The biggest fairy tale of them all.

So please, do your children and grandchildren a favor and STOP telling Bible "stories." Show the scriptures the respect they deserve and start sharing its "histories" instead.

Additional reading:
Where did the Brother of Jared Get the Idea of Shining Stones?

The Myths of Cain

I grew up in a Christian culture that unofficially believed that Cain was cursed to wander the earth as a vagabond forever. And that the rest of mankind was warned, by the mark that God set upon him, not to kill him or risk suffering an even greater threat. These stories insisted that Cain was alive and well today. There were also stories circulating of early church leaders having seen him in one instance or another.

I always thought that was an odd concept. Why would a murderer be transfigured and allowed to walk the earth like John the Beloved and the three Nephite apostles? I also wondered how he would have survived the flood. Did he walk along the bottom of the ocean, zombie style? Did he cling to the outside of the ark? Things just didn't add up.

The more I studied, the more I realized that there is nothing in the scriptures that supports this notion. Nor was there any official doctrine of the church that supported this idea. To the contrary, the scriptures are clear that Noah and his family (8 people) were the only humans who survived the flood.

1 Peter 3:20 

20 Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

The Flood of Noah and his Companions (1911) by Léon Comerre

Another tradition is that Cain lived up to, and was killed by the flood. But that would make him the oldest living man in history - at around 1650 years. And it is pretty clear that Methuselah holds that record at 969 years.

My favorite answer to this puzzle comes from the Book of Jubilees Chapter 4: 29-31

29. And at the close of the nineteenth jubilee, in the seventh week in the sixth year thereof, Adam died, and all his sons buried him in the land of his creation, and he was the first to be buried in the earth.
30. And he lacked seventy years of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore was it written concerning the tree of knowledge: 'On the day that ye eat thereof ye shall die.' For this reason he did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it.
31. At the close of this jubilee Cain was killed after him in the same year; for his house fell upon him and he died in the midst of his house, and he was killed by its stones; for with a stone he had killed Abel, and by a stone was he killed in righteous judgment.

Cain (1880) by the French painter Fernand-Anne Piestre Cormon

I don't see why this source should be doubted. The narrative in the Book of Jubilees mirrors the canonical scriptures almost exactly, but with greater detail. And the extra detail seems ordinary, not fanciful or mythical. (I don't know why I gravitate to the mundane instead of the fantastic. But I have to admit, I do.)

Cain lived almost as long as his father, dying the same year as Adam in a house collapse. Was it an earthquake? Maybe. There are so many clues that point to the world being much more seismically active before the flood. (Read: Why Did the Pre-Flood Civilization Build Megalithic)

I also like the nice poetic justice. Cain suffered death by stone, just like his brother Abel did.

But wait a minute. Did Cain use a rock? The canonical scriptures don't say anywhere which murder weapon Cain used. Why does everyone just believe and accept that it was a stone. It is not like they were Neanderthals. It is probably sources like the Book of Jubilees that provide us with that detail. So maybe it was a stone after all.