Hi! Welcome back to my study of Genesis. If you’re interested in prior posts, please visit the menu on my page, click on “Books” in the drop-down, and then click on Genesis.
Just a reminder, not everything that I share is something that I personally believe, endorse, etc.
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Genesis 6:18-22
18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground, according to its kind, two of every sort shall come in to you to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and store it up. It shall serve as food for you and for them.” 22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.
Genesis 6:18But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.(18) My covenant.—There had been no covenant with Adam or with the Sethites, but in the higher state of things which began with Noah, man was to hold a more exactly defined relation to God; and though they had begun to attach the notion of Deity to the name Jehovah in the days of Enos (Genesis 4:26), yet it was not till the time of Moses that it became the distinct title of God in covenant with man. Of this relation a necessary result was revelation, as in no other way could there be a communication between the two contracting parties. Hence the Bible is called “The Old and New Covenant,” or “The Old and New Testament,” the Greek term being of wider meaning than either word with us, and signifying either an agreement between the living or the document by which a testator disposes of his property after his death (Hebrews 9:16-17). The title of covenant is more applicable to the Scriptures of the prior dispensation, which contain a series of such relations, all preparing for the last and best and most perfect, which was a Testament ratified in the blood of Christ.
In verse 18, we see the first usage of “my covenant” in the Bible. Covenant comes from בְּרִית bᵉrîyth, ber-eeth’; from H1262 (in the sense of cutting [like H1254]); a compact (because made by passing between pieces of flesh):—confederacy, (con-) feder(-ate), covenant, league.
In the rest of verse 18 through the end of chapter 6, we find out who and what will be on the ark.
From the Pulpit Commentary:
Genesis 6:19And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.Verses 19-21. – And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort (literally, by twos, i.e. in pairs) shalt thou bring into – or cause to enter, i.e. receive them when they come (ver. 20) – the ark, to keep them alive – literally, to cause to live; ἴνα τρέφης (LXX.); in order to preserve alive (sc. the animals) – with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind (literally, of the fowl after its kind), and of cattle after their kind (literally, of the cattle after its kind), of every creeping thing of the earth after its bind, two of every sort shall come unto thee. “Non hominis actu, sed Dei nutu” (Augustine). Perhaps through an instinctive presentment of the impending calamity (Lange, ‘Speaker’s Commentary’). And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee (collecting sufficient for a twelvemonth’s sustenance); and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.Genesis 6:20Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.Genesis 6:21And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.
One of the arguments both for and against the idea that the Flood was global is the collection of the animals. Certainly the Ark may have been large enough to house many exotic regional animal species. But is there enough room on the ark for every single animal variety on the planet? What about dinosaurs?
- There are actually some Christians who believe and teach that dinosaurs died in The Great Flood. I lack the expertise in this field to weigh in strongly. When I do not know something, I prefer to give varying opinions room to speak. Here are a couple of the arguments for dinosaurs living recently and dying in the Flood.
- https://genesisapologetics.com/faqs/dinosaurs-lived-recently-and-died-in-noahs-flood/
- https://creationtoday.org/dinosaur-graveyard-is-more-evidence-of-noahs-flood/
- https://www.icr.org/article/did-dinosaurs-survive-flood/
One consistent point, with respect to the above links, is a belief that “the Bible is clear” about one thing or another. If you have followed along with me to this point, through Genesis, you can guess that I do not see absolute clarity from Genesis on a variety of topics. The text was not written in the post-Enlightenment Era, with an eye toward answers the potential questions of lawyers and scientists. It was written by and for a Bronze Age audience. The result of that lack of clarity, for me, is that I am open to the idea of a seven literal day Creation, dinosaurs living alongside humans pre-Flood, etc., and I am also open to the idea that those things are not precisely how it happened.
Beyond just the idea of dinosaurs, there is an apparently scientific link between Great Flood(s) and mass extinction.
In North America, at around the time of the end of the Last Ice Age, a wide range of megafauna disappeared from history. Those now extinct animals include Sabretooth cats, mastadons, mammuthus trogontherii, megaloceros, dire wolves, the American Pleistocene lion, giant cave bears, and scores of others. Interestingly, the death of these animals lines up closely with an event known as the Younger Dryas. The geological record shows that on either end of the historical Young Dryas period are two huge world floods: Meltwater Pulse 1A and Meltwater Pulse 1B.
Pulse 1A coincides with or closely follows the abrupt onset of the Bølling-Allerød (B-A) interstadial and warming in the NorthGRIP ice core in Greenland at 14,600 calendar years ago. During meltwater pulse 1A, sea level is estimated to have risen at a rate of 40–60 mm (0.13–0.20 ft)/yr. This rate of sea level rise was much larger than the rate of current sea level rise, which has been estimated to be in the region of 2–3 mm (0.0066–0.0098 ft)/yr.
Pulse 1A overlaps much of the megafaunal die-off in North America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ-TAghIlig
Pulse 1B is a source of more scientific disagreement. However, there is some agreement that a sudden sea rise event took place approximately 11,300 years ago.
The largest of the Antarctic Iceberg Discharge events is AID2. Its peak intensity at about 11,300 calendar years ago, which is synchronous with meltwater pulse 1B in the Barbados sea-level record, is consistent with a significant Antarctic contribution to meltwater pulse 1B.
In 2004, Liu and Milliman reexamined the original data from Barbados and Tahiti and reconsidered the mechanics and sedimentology of reef drowning by sea level rise. They concluded that meltwater pulse 1B occurred between 11,500 and 11,200 calendar years ago, a 300-calendar year interval, during which sea level rose 13 meters (43 ft) from −58 meters (−190 ft) to −45 meters (−148 ft), giving a mean annual rate of around 40mm/yr.
Coincidentally (or not) this 11,300 years ago time period lines up eerily well with Plato’s records concerning the Flood of Atlantis.
Plato’s writings indicated that Atlantis sunk 9,000 years prior to his ancestor Solon‘s visit to Egypt. Solon visited Egypt in 600 B.C. This, then, would date the destruction of Atlantis as having occurred (roughly) around 11,600 years ago.
A sunken city was discovered off the coast of India just after the turn of the century. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm
The mystery (one of the mysteries, at least) of the sunken city is that it is believed by scientists to have been flooded by rising water levels, a result of the end of the last Ice Age, around 9-10 thousand years ago (seven to eight thousand B.C.) If humans were building cities at the scale of this sunken one, that long ago, then it re-writes our understanding of history.
Some people might not know that the British Isles were connected to mainland Europe not that long ago (geologically speaking, at least.) The area of land that once connected Britain with Europe was called Doggerland.
A recent hypothesis suggests that much of the remaining coastal land was flooded by a megatsunami around 6200 BC, caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway known as the Storegga Slide. This suggests: “that the Storegga Slide tsunami would have had a catastrophic impact on the contemporary coastal Mesolithic population…. Britain finally became separated from the continent and in cultural terms, the Mesolithic there goes its own way.” A study published in 2014 suggested that the only remaining parts of Doggerland at the time of the Storegga Slide were low-lying islands, but supported the view that the area had been abandoned at about the same time as the tsunamis.
There is a regional Flood that is tied by hypothesis to Noah.
In 1997, William Ryan, Walter Pitman and their colleagues first published the Black Sea deluge hypothesis. They proposed that a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean seawater into the Black Sea freshwater lake occurred at 7,150 14C years BP (7550 calendar years BP). Before that date, glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes draining into the Aegean Sea. As glaciers retreated, some of the rivers emptying into the Black Sea declined in volume and changed course to drain into the North Sea. The levels of the lakes dropped through evaporation, while changes in worldwide hydrology caused overall sea level to rise.
The rising Mediterranean finally spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosporus. The event flooded 100,000 km2 (39,000 sq mi) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. According to these researchers, 50 km3 (10 cu mi) of water poured through each day, two hundred times the flow of Niagara Falls. The Bosporus valley roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days. They argued that the catastrophic inflow of seawater resulted from an abrupt sea-level jump that accompanied the Laurentide Ice Sheet collapse and the ensuing breach of a bedrock barrier in the Bosporus strait.
As proposed, the Early Holocene Black Sea flood scenario describes events that would have profoundly affected prehistoric settlement in eastern Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and possibly was the basis of oral history concerning Noah’s flood. Some archaeologists support this theory as an explanation for the lack of Neolithic sites in northern Turkey. In 2003, Ryan and coauthors revised the dating of the early Holocene Noah’s flood to 8,400 14C years BP (8800 calendar years BP).
Popular discussion of this Early Holocene Black Sea flood scenario was headlined in The New York Times in December 1996 and later published as a book.
There are Flood myths from almost every culture on earth. You can find a list of them here. Among those are the Epic of Gilgamesh. I will save my take on that comparison for a later post.
The Black Sea hypothesis has the “virtue” of tying in with the strange Nephilim theory regarding elongated skull people – as highlighted by Brien Foerster in particular – who have had skeletal remains found in both the Black Sea and as far away as Peru.
Miscellaneous
If you thought “elongated skull people” was a weird place to end the previous section, let me take it a step farther.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu6FxaD_NIg
I post the video 1) because it is out there, and 2) because it highlights an interesting story regarding Noah that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. When the scroll was first published, it actually made headlines in the New York Times. In the Book of Lamach, Noah’s father accuses his wife of adultery because of Noah’s strange appearance. Lamach then seeks out advice from Enoch and is told the child is his and to raise the child as though he is his own. More below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N92V_neXl3c
Noah’s Ark: The Great Pyramid? https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1243945/egypt-dead-sea-scroll-scan-noah-ark-great-pyramid-genesis-flood-middle-east-spt
There was clearly a lot of weird and seemingly conflicting information from ancient sources. Proceed with what you hear in wisdom.
