By Jonathan Sarfati
Hardly anything in the Bible has been attacked as much as God’s cataclysmic judgment of Noah’s Flood. This started with a Scottish physician called James Hutton (1726–97), who decreed in 1785, before examining the evidence: ‘the past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now … No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle’ (emphasis added). This was not a refutation of biblical teaching of Creation and the Flood, but a dogmatic refusal to consider them as even possible explanations—just like the scoffers Peter predicted in 2 Peter 3.However, disbelief in the Flood has become so entrenched that even many ostensibly Christian colleges don’t teach it. However, Jesus taught the Flood was real history, as real as His future second coming: ‘Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the Ark. Then the Flood came and destroyed them all.’ (Luke 17:26–27) In this passage, Jesus straightforwardly talks about Noah as a real person (who was His ancestor—Luke 3:36), the Ark as a real vessel, and the Flood as a real event. So those of a broadly conservative theological disposition will not deny the Flood completely, but will claim that it was merely a local event, usually in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). However, the liberals, who care nothing for Jesus’s words, go even further. A very common view is that the biblical story of Noah’s Flood was not historical at all, and was borrowed from flood legends in Mesopotamia.
The Gilgamesh Epic: In 1853, the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard and his team were excavating the palace library of the ancient Assyrian capital Nineveh. Among their finds were a series of 12 tablets of a great epic. The tablets dated from about 650 BC, but the poem was much older ...


