The horror of the Biblical flood

The massive destruction caused by the Flood is often not understood.

"Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth." [3]

"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!

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--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." [1]

"all the springs of the great deep [springs below the oceans] burst forth,

and the floodgates of the heavens [the sky] were opened.

And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights." [5]

In our scenario in the last article, 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 superheated, and there were also the most massive earthquakes and volcano's, and also 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, where the greatest destruction occured in the first 40 days:

"For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased

They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains

The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet." [4]

"the high mountains" would probably have been lower than the ones today. 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:

"The water receded steadily from the earth. 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." [6]

After just over 9 months the vegetation started to regrow:

"He (Noah) waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.

Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.

He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again,

After ten and a half months the surface of the earth looked dry:

"By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year,

After 1 year and 10 days the earth was dry enough to walk on:

"By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

"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." [9]

The Bible has described a world wide, catastrophic flood of unimaginable proportions.

[2] The 'ark' was the huge wooden boat that Noah built for himself & the animals.