This article provides an overview of biblical teaching on the Mabbul destruction in the time of Noah, and relates this to geological evidences.
(a) The Flood was a judgment of God to wipe out all humanity save those
in the Ark.
The reason for it is seen in the events leading up to the Flood - there was nowhere on earth where there was righteousness. Evil filled the hearts of all humans. The Flood came as a judgment upon the whole of humanity because it had turned completely away from God. "Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5). God was "grieved that He had made man on the Earth" (Genesis 6:6). It was not the case that some sections of the community were better than others. The judgment was to be anthropologically universal. None were allowed to escape apart from the eight people on the Ark.
The situation is analogous to the time before the Second Coming of Christ: Matthew 24:38 39 "...up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. This is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man." All of humanity was involved in the day of judgment in the time of Noah and all will be involved in the Day of Christ's return.
There are implications here for all local flood models. It is impossible to confine people! In more recent times, settlers in America spread out very quickly, as they did in other parts of the world. There is a huge credibility gap in holding to a local flood model and at the same time affirming the anthropological universality of the Flood.
(b) The Flood was a sudden destruction.
We need to be able to talk about the Flood like Jesus Christ did. In His preaching,
there were repeated warnings of sudden destruction.
In Matthew 24:38-41 and Luke 17:26-35, Jesus refers to the Flood beginning suddenly
and He draws an analogy between the judgments in the days of Noah, on Sodom
and in the future when He returns. Each judgment is presented as sudden.
(1) The people carried on as usual until Noah entered the Ark.
(2) The day Lot left Sodom was the same day as the city was destroyed by a downpour
of fire and sulphur.
(3) On the day Christ returns, people may be in the home, they may be in the
field - but His coming will bring their activity to an abrupt conclusion and
usher in the end of the age.
On one particular day (Genesis 7:11), all (not one!) the springs of the great deep burst forth, the floodgates of heaven were opened and torrential rain fell for 40 days. On that day, the eight people and the animals had entered the Ark. Delay, even for a day, was not an option. They needed the shelter. It was not long before the Ark was afloat, preserving those inside whilst all outside "that had the breath of life in its nostrils died" (Genesis 7:22). Did any survive outside of the Ark after the first day? The bursting forth of the springs is an indication that everywhere on Earth was awash with surging water on the very first day. If anything did survive, it could not have been much longer than a day as the inundation was so overwhelming. The parallel Jesus grew with Sodom and with His own return indicates that the destruction of life was all over very quickly.
This means that much Diluvialist thinking is wide of the mark, because many want there to be a slow rising of the waters on the land, allowing animals to breed and make nests while they retreat from the rising waters. This scenario does not do justice to the Biblical record. Local flood approaches are hopelessly deficient because there is always a way of escape. From the Genesis Flood, there was no escape.
(c) The Flood was a destruction on the land with its non-human inhabitants
as well as on humanity.
The reason for this is found in the relationship between Adam and Eve and the world God gave them to rule over (Genesis 1:28). They were given dominion over everything (Genesis 3:17) - so after the Fall, God not only punished Adam and Eve, he also put the marks of his anger on the creation itself. This is the Edenic curse. This is what Paul was referring to when he wrote about the creation "groaning as in the pains of childbirth" (Romans 8:22). This is the same creation that experienced judgment when the descendants of Adam were judged. It is the same creation that will one day be in the fires of judgment. It will again be destroyed - only to be transformed and "liberated from its bondage to decay" (Romans 8:21). On that Day, the Earth will enter into the redemption that Christ has purchased and there will be the New Heaven and the New Earth.
The lack of violence to the Earth in most Diluvialist thinking has been the subject of comment by Morton (1995) who holds to a local flood view involving the flooding of the mediterranean Basin. He draws attention to Genesis 6:13: "So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the Earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the Earth."
"Most advocates of the global flood miss a subtlety in this verse. It says that God will destroy both the people and the Earth. Everyone knows that the people were destroyed by the flood, but if the term "eretz" is to be interpreted in a global, planet-wide sense, then God did not accomplish what He said He would. He did not destroy the Earth! But God did destroy the land! The deep Mediterranean basin is no longer dry land and hasn't been for the past 5.5 million years. Thus we must conclude that the flood was a regional event involving the Mediterranean basin rather than a global occurrence"(page 135).
In response to this, the Recolonisation approach to Earth history maintains that God did destroy the Earth (all the antediluvian land areas) and that this is important theologically as well as a matter of history. Attempts to diminish this aspect of revealed truth are undermining the coherence of Scripture as a whole. The Flood was a type and a foreshadowing of what will happen to the universe when Christ returns (2 Peter 3:5-13). Whilst the Flood is a lesser destruction, it has to be of enormous significance in the history of the Earth. A local flood will not do.
(d) The Mabbul
In Genesis the word Mabbul is used of the destruction. It applies to the first 40 days of the time when Noah was on the Ark. The Mabbul is the Cataclysm. It was overwhelming. After these 40 days, the springs of the great deep are closed, the floodgates of heaven are stopped and the torrential rain ceases. That has to signify a cessation of destruction. After 150 days, God remembered Noah (Genesis 8:1) and the waters started to recede. Restoration was under way.
Rather than develop a lengthy argument, here are a few issues that are relevant to biblically-based science.
(a) the methodology of historical sciences (historical geology, evolutionary
biology, archaeology, forensic science) differs in numerous areas from the methodologies
used in empirical sciences. In particular, historical sciences cannot carry
out experiments that relate directly to past historical events - which are unique.
This is a limitation that provides constraints - but does not rule out genuine
science being undertaken. However, the shoehorning of data to fit preconceived
theories is always to be deplored - whether it is done by uniformitarians or
catastrophists.
(b) the phenomenon described as "God of the gaps" is not being advocated here. Where Scripture indicates God acting in miraculous ways, we are happy to refer to miracles, but without this Scriptural guidance, it is not our practice to invoke miracles to make sense of the data.
Most Flood geology models have made great play of the global Cambrian unconformity and the Cambrian rocks being the lowest containing hard bodied fossils. Many have thought that the unconformity surface was the base of the Flood erosion. The problem with this is that the evidences for catastrophism below this unconformity are often greater than the evidences of catastrophism above it!
The macroscopic scale of Precambrian rocks generally, and Archaean rocks in particular, is pervasive. As an example in the UK, visitors to Snowdonia National Park in North Wales can inspect the Padarn Tuff near Llanberis. This Precambrian welded volcanic ash fills a vast channel and is at least 1 (if not 2) kilometers thick. Significantly, there are no bedding plane horizons to mark successive flows or surges of ash. The whole unit is welded together without distinct breaks. The volcanic activity producing this deposit is utterly unlike anything going on today: it was an extraordinarily catastrophic event. To appreciate the Precambrian, it is necessary to abandon mental models based on present-day processes.
The Flood released extraordinary destructive power. The "springs of the great deep" which "burst forth" is hardly a technical description. The words need interpreting in terms of geological activity. I understand them to refer to global crustal fracturing with the catastrophic surging of water and probably magma from within the Earth. Accompanying this was the outpouring from the windows of heaven (which may be linked to bolide impacts) and the torrential rain. These ingredients establish some benchmark principles for Diluvialism.
1. The scenario is not one of the sea rising gradually to flood the land. This option fails to capture the violence and the immediacy of the occasion. Rather, it does not really matter what is land and what is sea - the cataclysm affects both. Because land is somewhat elevated, the Mabbul would quickly wash everything belonging to the Antediluvian world into the sea.
2. With fracturing of the crust and release of water from the Earth, decompression effects would be significant and hot rocks at depth can be expected to melt and flow upwards. This is envisaged this as an avalanche process. Since the earth's surface was covered with water, the consequence would be pillow lavas, peperites and hyaloclastic deposits in addition to extensive igneous activity and massive sedimentation. All the sediments coming from the Antediluvian world would be mingled with the products of igneous activity, with extensive metamorphism, and this would have had the effect of obliterating fossils. For more on peperites, see Walker (2004), noting that these textures are widely documented in the Precambrian.
The Recolonisation approach does involve a destruction of the Earth. The Mabbul corresponds to the Hadean and possibly much of the Archaean, during which the earth's crust (to depths of at least 10 km) were reworked. One of the few Diluvialists to recognise the importance of the Archaean (apart from Recolonisers) is Hunter (1996).
"The five detailed stratigraphic sections through Archaean strata .. .. show that the lower Archaean strata are comprised dominantly of extrusive volcanics with basal conglomerates and some quartzites, cherts, graphitic shales and limestones. The volcanic sequences are usually terminated abruptly at their top by a sudden transition to sedimentary strata. This transition may have resulted from sudden cessation of the major activity of 'the fountains' at the end of Day 40 of the Flood." (p.349).
The Archaean high-grade metamorphics and igneous bodies are massive, and require thinking on a grand scale to understand their formation. No body fossils are present - only biochemical traces of life. There is evidence that water temperatures were high: 55-85°C. "Oxygen isotope data combined with the results of geological and sedimentological studies demonstrate that enclaves of synsedimentary to very early diagenetic cherts are widely preserved in the 3.5-3.2 Ga Swaziland Supergroup, Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa. The low 18O values of these cherts indicate extremely high ocean temperatures of 55-85 °C." (Knauth and Lowe, 2003). There is very limited data on water temperatures, but the prediction of the Recolonisation approach is that the South African data is representative of much of the Archaean. This is borne out by Knauth's (2005) analysis: "Oxygen isotope data for early diagenetic cherts indicate surface temperatures on the order of 55–85 °C throughout the Archean".
Summary: The Hadean/Archaean was a time of "melt-down" for the Earth. Whilst conventional geology views this time as the initial establishment of continental crust, the Recolonisation approach sees it as a time of destruction and remaking the Earth's crust. The geological data therefore complements the biblical record of the Mabbul destruction, where God destroyed the Earth along with all air breathers, save those in the Ark.
David J. Tyler (January 2005, updated March 2005)
References
Hunter, M.J. 1996. Is the pre-Flood/Flood boundary in the earth's mantle? EN Tech Journal, 10(3), 344-357.
Knauth, L.P., and Lowe, D.R. 2003. High Archean climatic temperature inferred from oxygen isotope geochemistry of cherts in the 3.5 Ga Swaziland Supergroup, South Africa, Geological Society of America Bulletin: 115(5), 566-580.
Knauth, L.P. 2005. Temperature and salinity history of the Precambrian ocean: implications for the course of microbial evolution, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 219(1-2), 53-69.
Morton, G. 1995. Foundation, Fall and Flood. DMD Publishing Co., Texas.
Walker, T. 2004. Peperite: more evidence of large-scale watery catastrophe, TJ, 18(1), 18-21.
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