by Glenn R. Morton 2019 updated March 15,2020
I have spent 4 posts in exquisite or excruciating detail showing why the science says IF we are to have a single couple, Adam and Eve, they must have lived more than five million years ago. If you are not familiar with that evidence go see it, because this will make no sense to anyone who doesn't understand why Adam and Eve must be ancient. The previous posts in this effort are Days of Proclamation and the series When did Adam Live? part 1,part 2, part 3 part 4. And if you are ever interested in evidence of the existence of the soul, see Quantum Soul, but it's a different topic.
This post is the toughest to write both spiritually and personally because first, it gives away the rest of the framework for how to have a historical Bible, and secondly those who read this without the preface will think I am barking mad. But I will say this, at least I lived my life with this purpose, to find solutions to the problems at this end of the Scripture; while most others surrendered to the atheist criticisms that the Bible is full of factless, scientific nonsense and then believe it carries divine theology anyway. I'm not sure which of us is more barking mad. Maybe we both are. Below is a theory of Eden and the Flood that matches what the Bible says, and it doesn't violate any of the data we know about. Indeed, the events below are spoken of in hundreds of scientific articles.
I want to point out that the ancient Hebrew writer would have had no knowledge of geologic history and what I am about to say. He would not have understood the significance of what he wrote. I hold, as I did in my Days of Proclamation post, that God has a problem. He has to be able to communicate with Neolithic men and with 21st century scientists. That means, what the writer thought he was writing might not be what was intended. I do believe this information as divinely inspired as it is simply far too old a time to depend upon word of mouth, oral tradition. But I do believe in a miraculous God who can inspire the writer to write what He wants. If God isn't that powerful, then there is no way He could raise a dead body.
One more short preface. The word translated 'earth' is eretz, and it means land. It doesn't really have the connotation of planet earth. Thus, when that word comes up below, I take it to mean land.
In the telling of the Eden story, I cannot separate its story from that of the Flood, so these two stories will be intermingled. Of Eden, many commentators have given up hope that it exists. These are the things spoken of about Eden by people who say they believe the Bible.
"Some have gone further and claimed the geographical allusion is to a fantasy. For Cassuto, 'The Garden of Eden according to the Torah was not situated in our world.' Skinner claimed: 'it is obvious that a real locality answering the description of Eden exists and has existed nowhere on the face of the earth...(T)he whole representation (is) outside the sphere of real geographic knowledge. In (Genesis 2) 10-14, in short, we have...a semi-mythical geography.' For Ryle, 'The account...is irreconcilable with scientific geography.' Radday believed that Eden is nowhere because of its deliberately tongue-in-cheek fantastic geography. McKenzie asserted that 'the geography of Eden is altogether unreal; it is a Never-never land.' Amit held the garden story to be literary utopiansim, that the Garden was 'never-known,' with no real location. Burns' similar view is that the rivers were the entryway into the numinous world. An unusual mixture of views was maintained by Wallace, who held that the inclusion of the Tigris and Euphrates indicated an 'earthly geographic situation,' but saw the Eden narrative as constructed from a garden dwelling-of-God motif (with rivers nourishing the earth) combined with a creation motif, both drawing richly from those motifs as found in Ancient Near East mythological literature. 1
Obviously, the consensus is that Eden is a faerie tale and it remains a faerie tale because no one looks further and no one has the courage to suggest it is real, with real data. My courage is weak because I know the reception I have received on these ideas before. What I am going to show is that events in the late Miocene (remember Miocene), about 5.3 million years ago, fit the Biblical descriptions to a T. This is the best match of scientific data to the Biblical description you will ever see.
Fourteen million years ago, Africa's slow movement north closed the Tethys ocean by ramming into Eurasia in the area of Iran. This created the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean sea which at that time was still open to the Atlantic ocean. Around 5.96 million years ago(dates vary), the Mediterranean world was quite different than it is today. At that time, the Strait at Gibraltar had risen above sea level had separated the waters of the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. This also was due to the slow movement of the African continent northward and pushing it against Europe. A guy who worked for me briefly in 1975 had done his master's thesis on how long it would take for the water in the Mediterranean to evaporate. He told me about 4,000 years. His work was part of an aborted idea to build a dam across the Gibraltar Strait. More refined work has shown the same time frame for the near total evaporation of the waters of the Mediterranean.2
The closure of the Gibraltar Strait created the biggest canyon the world has ever known. 3 to 5 km deep and nearly a million square miles in area. This has been known for a very long time.
"The Mediterranean is an area of strong evaporation; by the middle Miocene it was reduced to an empty desert basin dotted with playas in which strong brines deposited gypsum and anhydrite with at least one bored thick deposit of rock salt. That this former (and present) sea area should have been reduced by evaporation to a desert 3,000 m below sea level during the Miocene seems unbelievable, but the distribution of evaporites in a pattern of desert lakes, the existence of high temperatures (anhydrites are precipitated only above 35 C) and the occurrence of stromatolitic dolomite (which requires sunlight for its development, not the gloom of ocean depths), and the occurrence of mudcracks filled with windblown silt in some cores, is strong evidence. The Red Sea basin was similar. And finally, countries around the Mediterranean -France, Algeria, Libya, Syria Israel and others- have very puzzling gorges, cut through hard rocks and descending in the coastlands as much as 1,000 m below sea level. Even the rivers which cut these Miocene gorges were insufficient to counteract the high evaporation rate of this appalling Miocene Basin. "3
During this time the Nile river cut an amazingly sharp canyon into the granite basement of Egypt. This was first discovered by Russians building the Aswan Dam,
"In an effort to find hard rock for the dam's foundation, fifteen boreholes were drilled. To the Russian's amazement, they discovered a deep narrow gorge under the Nile Valley, cut 200 meters below sea level into hard granite. The valley had been drowned some 5 million years ago and was filled with Pliocene marine muds, which were covered by the Nile alluvium. Aswan is about 1,200 kilometers upstream from the Mediterranean coast. In the Nile Delta, boreholes more than 300 meters deep were not able to reach the bottom of the old Nile canyon. Chumakov estimated that the depth of the incision there might reach 1,500 meters, and he visualized a deeply buried estuary under the sands and silts of the modern Nile Delta. Chumakov was right; a narrow 2,500-meter-deep canyon under Cairo was recently discovered during geophysical explorations for petroleum in Egypt."4.
The Nile canyon north of Cairo gets as deep as 3500 m, which means that floor of the Mediterranean was nearly 4 km deep at that time.5
The world wasn't the same as it is today. Today the Tigris and Euphrates empty into the Persian Gulf, but 5.3 million years ago, there was no Persian Gulf. Most of the land of Israel and Lebanon were not in existence. The shortest distance to the lowest spot around for these two rivers at that time was the Mediterranean canyon. The world looked like this:6 (click on picture to enlarge)
The red line near where Israel is today is the future site of the Dead Sea, but it isn't in existence yet, and neither is one arm of the Red Sea, which was not filled with water yet. Below, I will enlarge the area of the above map around the eastern Mediterranean and show what I think the rivers mentioned in Genesis were doing.
So, where was Eden? Genesis 2:10-14 says:
"A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates (Gen. 2:10-14 [NIV]).
The first river, Pishon, came off Arabia. The Bible says that the Pishon compassed the whole of Havilah. Havilah is defined in the Bible as being in Arabia.
And they dwelt from Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria: Gen 25:18
Today this river is gone, but 5.3 million years ago, Arabia was tilted towards the Mediterranean and drained that land into the Mediterranean at the Afiq canyon. Mart and Ryan say:
"The Afiq Canyon and its offshore apron as well as equivalents such as the Nahr Menashe fluvial system off Lebanon, imply that the geography of the Levant during late Miocene differed from the present. The Levant Rift could not have been a continuous tectonic depression as it is in the present, but rather a sufficiently disconnected series of grabens that allowed large rivers to still flow in between. The presence of the Afiq apron of substantial volume and with a thickness approaching 200 m along its apex confirms active fluvial systems feeding their bedloads into the Mediterranean as recent as 5 million years ago. "http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/2019/51612mart/ndx_mart.pdf
They fit together if we look at the world as it would have appeared to a very, very ancient Adam. Looking at the map below, most of the land of Israel didn't exist. The Persian Gulf didn't exist. But the Zagros and Taurus mountains of Iran and Turkey did and water flowing off of them had to go somewhere. The nearest low area was the Mediterranean desert. There are canyons cut into bedrock along the Levant coast testifying that rivers did come that direction. Below is the map showing how it all fits together(click picture to enlarge).
One of the most exciting things for me is that while researching for writing this, I found a data point that I had been looking for, for 25 years, a map of the upper Miocene offshore Lebanon. Recall that the Euphrates today comes close to the Mediterranean but makes effectively a right turn and heads to the Persian Gulf. What blocks it now is the Dead Sea rift, where land around the Dead sea is uplifting at the same time the land on top of the bulge is falling deeper.
If the Euphrates emptied into the Mediterranean there should be big channel deposits showing that. And so, seismic shot this decade show that the predicted channels actually exist. The sediments they deposited are captured via seismic data, which was acquired because Israel has become a big gas producer. the green clastic deposit is coming right out of the area where the Euphrates has its closest approach to the Mediterranean. This much sediment comes from a major river, and the Euphrates qualifies both in location and in size. I have marked where the Euphrates entered the Mediterranean
This touches on a sad story from my career. In late 2008 or so, three men came to me asking if I would get my client into their prospect. They said they would give me a finder's fee. I told them I couldn't ethically take that fee but if I thought the project was good, I would recommend it. I did recommend this but because my client worked in Islamic countries, they turned the opportunity down. This project became the Leviathon prospect, which was a massive structure and had all the attributes we like to see before we drill. Leviathon was drilled and it held enough natural gas to meet Israel's needs for 40 years. This caused an explosion of seismic acquisition all over the eastern Mediterranean, and last night, I found evidence of the Euphrates deposition into the Mediterranean in the form of a giant, 2 km wide channel seen on the seismic.8 And if you look up where Batroun, Lebanon is, you will see that this channel is coming out of Syria and is in the right position to be the Tigris River. The land outlined on the SE part of the map, is the northernmost bulge of Lebanon.
The Bible says the Pison drained Havilah. The Bible places Havilah in Arabia, which today drains to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. But, 5.3 myr ago, it drained into the Mediterranean:
"An area mentioned in the phrase ‘from Havilah to Shur’; inhabited by the Ishmaelites (Gn. 25:18) and Amalekites (1 Sa. 15:7). It probably lay therefore in the area of Sinai and NW Arabia."9
Back when I formulated my views, very little geologic data was available from offshore Israel. The past 10 years have changed all that. They have discovered the Afiq channel which dug into the continental shelf during the time when the Mediterranean was dry.
Mart and Ryan note a major river 5.3 myr ago that matches the description of the Pison:
"...several rivers of the fluvial system of the Levant, which drained northwestern Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea during the Oligo-Miocene, still prevailed in the Messinian. The Afiq Canyon and its offshore apron as well as equivalents such as the Nahr Menashe fluvial system off Lebanon, imply that the geography of the Levant during late Miocene differed from the present. The Levant Rift could not have been a continuous tectonic depression as it is in the present, but rather a sufficiently disconnected series of grabens that allowed large rivers to still flow in between. The presence of the Afiq apron of substantial volume and with a thickness approaching 200 m along its apex confirms active fluvial systems feeding their bedloads into the Mediterranean as recently as 5 million years ago."10
Here is a picture of the Afiq channel from an online presentation.11
So we have the Pison draining Arabia (Havilah) entering the Mediterranean desert from the SE.
The Nile of course is the Gihon because it is the only river which encompasses Cush. It's sediments can be seen in the yellow clastics on this map:
This scenario for the flood has loads of scientific data in its favor and it does not violate any science, yet, as I have stated in my previous posts, too many Christians prefer their Bible to be false. I am always gobsmacked by that.
I want to make it clear that I do not believe that this information could have been handed down by oral tradition. The knowledge of the geography of the pre-flood world would have had to have been divinely inspired.
Life in Eden
While the Mediterranean was largely a desert, it wasn't totally dry because of the rivers, like the Nile flowing into the basin. Hsu notes:
"The Mediterranean hosted a series of fresh or brackish water lakes toward the end of the Messinian"12.
A vast array of animals lived on the dry Mediterranean bottom. I have listed them here. The list includes giraffes, big and small, camel, hippopotomi, elephants, sabre-tooth and lynx-like cats, rabbit-like animals, mice, deer, antelope, etc. It was not barren by any means. Hippos and elephants eat grass, and elephants also eat fruits and tree bark. Below is a hyaenid who lived on this land before the flood:
Thus, there would have been fresh water. It wasn't a hell hole. Hippos wandered down the Nile and up onto Cyprus, where their descendants shank in size to pigmy forms. Hsu writes:
"And apparently, hippopotami made their way from the Nile to Cyprus. The migratory traffic might have been more frequent if the wanderers had not had to travel across a desert 2,000 to 3,000 meters below sea level."13
It isn't only Cyprus where this happened.
“Ryan thought for a minute. He then responded, Charles Lyell reported a whole bunch of mammals suddenly appearing out of nowhere on the Mediterranean islands, such as Sicily, Sardinia, and Malta. Maria Cita mentioned this to me on the Glomar Challenger. There are elephants and hippos in Cyprus and Crete. In scrambling to high ground in response to the flood they arrived in places they had never been before.”14
Indeed, European eels seem to have survived through the desiccation so it was never totally waterless. They acquired new breeding habits:
"We were nevertheless intrigued by a recent finding that eels living in rivers draining into the Mediterranean do not join their European and American relatives in the traditional 'breeding ground' for eels under the Sargasso sea. The southern European eels alone choose to breed in the Mediterranean. Did they acquire this habit 6 million years ago, when they could not jump across the Gibraltar Falls? We cannot be certain, of course, but the fact that the Mediterranean dried up permits some unorthodox suggestions to solve problems in biological evolution." 15
Carlo Sturani,16 did a study of sediments of this age and divided them into 5 units and found the following in them, in ascending order:
top
Pliocene deepwater marine
Messinian strata 5 river deposit with in situ roots, freshwater reeds
Messinian strata 4 land turtle, insects shallow-water fish, wood, large plants, land snails, horsetails, branchlets of Sequoia and Thuya. Winged seeds flowers bird feathers, a termite a fly a daddy long legs, grasshopper beetles dragon fly, damsel fly
Messinian strata 3 shallow water fish and gypsum
Messinian strata 2 fish that can live in shallow highly salty water
Messinian strata 1 deepwater fish lampfish
bottom
The best parallel to what life was like comes from the rivers of the Kalahari desert, which pour into the dry land, providing a large oasis of life in that otherwise hot, dry land.
The mist, the fountains, and the river
Genesis 2:5,6 says:
for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
I like what Kurt Wise said about Eden, because I think there is an easy case to make for the mist and artesian waters mentioned in the Scripture. Kurt said,
“This could mean it was fed by a spring—perhaps one of the ‘fountains of the great deep’ mentioned in Genesis 7:11.”17
Most people don't know of the Nubian sandstone, it is an ancient aquifer that covers Chad, Libya Egypt part of Israel, and some say it is even more wide spread than this. The Nubian sandstone has been the source of water for many a well. It contains 52,000 cubic kilometers of water. A North-South cross-section of it in Egypt looks like this(Click picture to enlarge):
The sand goes to the northern most point of Egypt and then almost certainly down into the basin. It is this which explains the river. I interpret the flow out of Eden, as an artesian spring fed by the Nubian or some other aquifer and it flows into the water system attached to the four rivers named in the later two verses. Here are two drawings of that scenario, first cross-section from the high Egyptian land to the south of Eden and then a map view the confining layer in the picture above is the impermeable bed at the top of the next drawing:
Here is a more professional drawing of an artesian well:
Anywhere the Nubian came close to the surface of the African continental slope, water would seep or spray out into the air. The reason no one had envisioned this solution to the mist problem before is that the empty Mediterranean is so utterly strange a world. But it is also absolutely factually true. Can one say artesian processes couldn't have created a mist? I don't think so. Artesian processes are an established scientific process.
Map of Eden
Scripture says:
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” Gen 2:10
“And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” Gen 2:10
That description can be matched precisely so long as one treats the word translated as ‘heads’ as meaning “primary or chief or main”.Ro'sh can mean this. Under this word choice,it reads,
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four main [rivers].
Doing that, and placing Eden in the midst of the main rivers,and making the area west of Eden into something that resembles the Okovango Delta of the Kalahari desert, or the Sudd or South Sudan, then one gets the following picture.
The area west of Eden in this scenario would look something like the Sudd swamp of southern Sudan. From Google maps, you can see channels going every which way:
This scenario matches what the Bible says, yet, few want to believe this view. I find that amazing because supposedly we live in an age where facts matter, and theories are proven based upon how well they fit the facts. Apparently facts really don't matter.
Rain
Genesis 2:5 says: LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth
Most people think this is nonsense. It isn't. Again, this scenario explains how that can be. A deep basin with little water has little moisture in the air with which to cause rain. Cold fronts from the NW will descend the European continental slope, and the humidity of descending air drops, and thus, does not rain.. Because there is little moisture in the basin, when the air rises again against the African or Asian continental mountains, they won't rain again, because they didn't pick up sufficient extra moisture. And if there is rain, it will always be on the edges of the basin as the air moves up the 3-5 km mountains surrounding the Mediterranean basin. But the rising air would almost always contain insufficient moisture to cause rain. This scenario fits what is described.
Further we have places on earth that receive little or no rain for a long, long time. From my book, Foundation, Fall and Flood:
"The Mediterranean desiccation has major implications for the interpretation of the first few chapters of Genesis and the inverted hydrology it describes. Assuming that the Bible is describing an area similar to the desiccated Mediterranean basin, the reversed hydrology becomes understandable. The lack of rain would be understandable, since the major source of water for rainfall in the Mediterranean region is the Mediterranean Ocean itself. But as noted above, there would be rain on earth. Without that abundant supply of moisture, rain would practically cease in the region. The prevailing wind in the Mediterranean region is from the north in January and from the east in July.17 This would make it extremely unlikely that any rain would fall in this basin. It is a well known fact that there is a rain shadow, a region which receives less rain, in basins immediately downwind from mountains because an air mass moving downhill lowers its relative humidity. This means that any moisture contained in the air as it spilled over into the desiccated Mediterranean Basin would be even less likely to form rain clouds. Rain would occur only near isolated mountains, like Malta, where the wind was forced upwards. The basin would be on the lee side of huge mountains in all directions.
"While it is rare for a region not to receive rainfall, it is not unknown. The Atacama Desert in Chile has regions which go as long as 5 years or more without any rain. Heavy rains fall on the desert only 2 to 4 times per century18. Some parts of the eastern Sahara like at Bir Tarfawi, has had no rainfall this century.19 Thus, for the Mediterranean to dry up, creating a region which did not receive rain, would be novel but not inconceivable.
As to the mists, or streams, which rose up out of the ground, two possibilities exist. First, the aquifers underlying the surface of the continental plateaus of Africa, Europe and Asia would have been busy disgorging their contents along the former continental slope, which was a mountainside when the Mediterranean basin was emptied. Many springs and seepages of water would arise in this fashion because the hydrostatic head on the subterranean waters would force the flow to lower surfaces in this fashion. Secondly, as rivers flow into the basin, on the apex of an alluvial cone, some of the water would soak into the ground and would ooze out of the ground at a lower elevation on the alluvial cone. "20
That an area can have no rainfall is not unheard of. After I wrote my book, I ran into this in 2005, and the link still works
"There are locations in the Atacama where not a single drop of rain has been recorded by humans, and the Edinburgh University researcher has studied dry river beds he can show have had no water running through them for 120,000 years."21
One hundred and twenty thousands years without water in the rivers. That is one dry place!
Again, this scenario can match what Scripture says and make Scripture historically true.
In a future post, I will come back to the issues involved in the creation of man and the Fall, and things like tents, brass and iron and other oddities listed in Genesis 4 and 5. But since the location of Eden screams out that it is a great place for a flood, it is to that we now turn.
The Flood
Now, having laid out where Eden was, we can look at the Flood. Amazingly the earliest idea of the Mediterranean flood comes from southern Spain (biblical Tarshish) and is reported by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History:
I believe that all the pre-flood events took place in this basin. If you think about this basin, it is surrounded by 3-5 km mountains. There are 1-4 km mountains inside the basin as well. It is a vast basin and Eden somewhere in the Eastern part of it. My PSCF article which was the first to suggest this location can be found here. It addresses some of these issue but don't use the browser Edge because it makes the font tiny.
To make a point of how this scenario matches even the tiniest details of the account, consider Gen 6:13:
And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth
It says God will destroy the land along with the man. Mesopotamian flooding didn't destroy the land. Mesopotamia still exists. The Mediterranean Flood destroyed a large land, which has never been seen again. This view is consistent with what many scholars have said of Eden, that it is utterly destroyed. Martin Luther said,
"Hence my opinion...is, first, that paradise was closed to man by sin, and secondly, that it was utterly destroyed and annihilated by the Flood, so that no trace of it is visible any longer---For the entire surface of the earth was changed."22
Gen 7:11-13, 19-22, 8:1-4 describes the flood
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
...
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. 20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. 21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: 22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
...
And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged; 2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained; 3 And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated. 4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat
I want to point out that many critics claim that the 'windows of heaven' refer to the supposed windows in the raqiya. See my Days of Proclamation post for why the entire idea of a solid dome is unsupported by historical data. More to the point, the word here for heavens, samayim, means sky, as in atmosphere. It is a euphemism like we say cloud burst, when the clouds do nothing of the kind.
Secondly, I would note that the description of the flood is of no common variety. The YECs are correct in that view. The commentators who place the flood in placid places like Mesopotamia, which is FLAT, can't possibly be using the Biblical description of the flood when they decide the location. The Flood was massive, widespread, long and terrifying.
Thirdly, I can think of no better term for the dam failure at Gibraltar, than fountains of the deep. Strong's defines it: deep, sea, abysses (of sea).1C primeval ocean, deep 23 This term refers to the ocean, and Mesopotamian floods are not from the ocean. No, Tsunamis can't reach Mesopotamia because the shallow Persian Gulf can't support the long wavelengths tsunami's have. Thus, once again, those who would place the flood in Mesopotamia ignore what the Scripture says.
Finally, I think the wind is what drove the Ark to ground on the Taurus mountain range, see map above. The Taurus Mountain Range is the Range running Through Turkey. A careful observation of the Upper Miocene paleogeography on that map shows that the ark might have been able to land on what became the kingdom of Uratu.
The Need for an Ark
Walking out of this basin would be very difficult and just getting to the top of the continental platform might not save you. Why? Well, you need to know that moist air forced upward causes rain. This is why there is more rain on the western side of the California mountains than there is in Nevada and Utah. The air rises against those mountains and dumps the water and when the air comes down in Nevada and Utah, the moisture is gone; the air is dry. Now, the empty Mediterranean basin contained 4 thousandths of today's atmosphere, I once calculated. That much air, brought to sea level pressure would fill a band 400 km wide along the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. This means, as the waters fill in the basin, the air picks up the moisture, rises along the basin edges, rain starts and then after the air gets to the top of the continental platforms of Africa, Asia and Europe, the moist air would move horizontally like a weather front, creating more rain in that 400 km wide band. Further, as long as the waters were rising, the rain would continue. It is often noted that 40 days and 40 nights is a euphemism for a long time, I think the rain lasted most of a year. Thus, there had to be an ark.
The Ark
No I don't think it was as big as what Answers in Genesis believes, but It was big enough to bring selected animals and enough food for the ride. Plenty of rain water was going to be available to drink--for an entire year.
The Dam Breaks
One fine lovely day the dam at Gibraltar broke and the waters pour through. There is a fine computer simulation of this event, and they even entitle it Noah's flood, but give me no credit for being the very first person to ever publish on this concept. Oh well, the video is worth watching but do it after you finish reading this or come back after you see the video. They also show the Black Sea infilling in the 2nd part of the video, but that never ever happened. The Black Sea Flood no longer is even believed by those who first proposed it. New data says that the Black Sea infilling never happened.
Hsu in 1972 believed in a slow fill of the Mediterranean basin. He wrote:
"One can picture the desiccated Mediterranean as a giant bathtub, with the Strait of Gibraltar as the faucet. Seawater roared in from the Atlantic through the strait in a gigantic waterfall. If the falls had delivered 1,000 cubic miles of sea water per year (equivalent to 30 million gallons per second, 10 times the discharge of Victoria Falls), the volume would not have been sufficient to replace the evaporative loss. In order to keep the infilling sea from getting too salty for even such a hardy microfauna as the one found in the dark gray marl the influx would have to exceed evaporation by a factor of 10. Cascading at a rate of 10,000 cubic miles per years, the Gibraltar falls would have been 100 times bigger than Victoria Falls and 1,000 times more so than Niagara. Even with such an impressive influx, more than 100 years would have been required to fill the empty bathtub."24
The sediments say the change from deep dry desert to deep water sedimentation was geologically instantaneous The sediments show no long term transistion from desert to deep water. The change is immediate.
“According to Cita, who used the bottom-dwelling fauna as a measure of water depth, the site of the dried-out salt lake had suddenly been transformed into a new marine sea thousands of feet deep and far removed from land. No transition was observed. The seabed creatures living directly on the anhydrite once the seawater returned were indicative of a ”bathyal realm” a term the paleoecologists generally reserved for the cold dark internal ocean three thousand or more feet below the warm sunlit sea surface. This observation supported the idea that the deserts had formed in a depression that had dried out and that the deserts had drowned suddenly by flooding of the depression under thousands of feet of newly supplied seawater.”25
But we have more data now. I noted in Foundation, Fall and Flood,
"The Trubi marl in Sicily, which rests on desert deposits, contains sea bottom dwelling animals that can only live in water depths in excess of 3,000 feet. The dam at Gibraltar must have broken at least to that depth so that these animals could crawl or be washed into the Mediterranean basin. This means that the collapse would have been catastrophic. Calculations show that with a break 3,000 feet deep, 15 miles wide, and a water speed of 15 miles per hour, the entire Mediterranean would refill in 8.4 months, an extremely short time compared with the massive quantity of water needed to fill this large basin. This is a time frame comparable to the time reported in the Bible for Noah's Flood. " 26
Furthermore, new data supports this short time frame. D. Garcia-Castellanos, et al. say in Nature, (yes,that most reputable of journals we all want to be published in. It shows this isn't a weird idea of mine, but a fully mainstream idea),
"The Mediterranean Sea became disconnected from the world’s oceans and mostly desiccated by evaporation about 5.6 million years ago during the Messinian salinity crisis The Atlantic waters found a way through the present Gibraltar Strait and rapidly refilled the Mediterranean 5.33 million years ago in an event known as the Zanclean flood. The nature, abruptness and evolution of this flood remain poorly constrained. Borehole and seismic data show incisions over 250 m deep on both sides of the Gibraltar Strait that have previously been attributed to fluvial erosion during the desiccation. Here we show the continuity of this 200-km-long channel across the strait and explain its morphology as the result of erosion by the flooding waters, adopting an incision model validated in mountain rivers. This model in turn allows us to estimate the duration of the flood. Although the available data are limited, our findings suggest that the feedback between water flow and incision in the early stages of flooding imply discharges of about 10^8 m3 s-1 (three orders of magnitude larger than the present Amazon River) and incision rates above 0.4 m per day. Although the flood started at low water discharges that may have lasted for up to several thousand years, our results suggest that 90 per cent of the water was transferred in a short period ranging from a few months to two years. This extremely abrupt flood may have involved peak rates of sea level rise in the Mediterranean of more than ten metres per day."27
Even a mainstream journal supports the extremely rapid infilling of the basin, in a time frame that would fit the Biblical time for the flood. Again, the scenario matches scientific data. Again, though, no, the Hebrew writer would not have appreciated the details of what he unknowingly put on paper. I would contend, that if the flood account was all made up, the facts wouldn't be able to be matched to any scenario at all.
The Mountains of Ararat
From Noah's old perspective, there were tall mountains on all side of them, everything was a mountain except for the flat plain. But now, the flood has come, and Noah and company were floating around, bobbing with every wave. The waters were coming in from the west, pushing their little ark to the east. So, one might ask, How did they land on the Mountains of Ararat?, Merely by landing on the Turkish shore. Every translation I checked calls what they landed on "the mountains" of Ararat. Plural. Thus there is no specific place that is designated, no particular elevation they had to be at only on the chain of mountains that crossed the land of Ararat and beyond. Thus, searches for the Ark are nonsense.
As I noted above, the scenario is capable of matching the landing place. We don't have to have water flow uphill, taking the ark from southern Mesopotamia uphill to the Mountains of Ararat. To me, the need for water to go uphill carrying the Mesopotamian ark is the most hilariously sad part of that view. If the flood were in Mesopotamia at the Neolithic, the water flow would have taken the ark into the Persian Gulf, not to Turkey. In this scenario, Noah and company get on an ark, 16,000 feet below sea level, and bob around for a while, as the inflowing waters lift them up to current sea level, and a wind blow them onshore. Nothing violates the laws of physics in this scenario. One can't say that for the Mesopotamian flood.
The Rainbow
Because of the lack of rain in the basin before the flood, there would never have been a rainbow in the sky. They might have seen the colors in the mists, but they would have appeared to be between the observer and the ground. The mists might would have been close to the ground, and thus, that too limits the prismatic effect in the dried Mediterranean basin to be towards the ground. But once they were out of the basin, in a normal meteorological setting, rainbows could be seen high in the sky.
Again, this scenario fits the Biblical descriptions exactly. But again, will point out that the Hebrew writer didn't understand all this. God needed to speak to him and us, with truth. Just because the ancient Hebrew didn't understand what he wrote correctly doesn't mean that God communicated badly.
Technology
Everybody believes humans are so inventive, and that farming and jet planes should have arisen rapidly after the flood. After all we is SMART! Well, people who think that, have not thought about the issues involved. I will end this post with a long passage from my book talking about how if 8 of us were the sole survivors on earth, it would be impossible to maintain our level of civilization and it might be millions of years before it re-developed. It is my book and I can quote as much as I want, and it is public domain now anyway. As you read this, think about all these activities, and then, what will you eat tonight? Not here and now, but what you would eat tonight if you were one of the 8 people left. Our basic problem in a post- apochalyptic world is hunger. Doing anything that won't feed you in a few hours is a path to death. When you get tired of reading this, just skip to the last sentence. I wrote(reference numbers changed to this article:
"Consider what you would do if you were told that only you and seven other people would survive a global catastrophe. Everything that you are familiar with would be destroyed and your little band of eight would be required to be self-sufficient. However, you will be allowed to take one item of technology with you. What would be the most important technology?
We will assume that you have landed in what once was Texas and will consider several questions. The most important of these questions is what would the implements of technology mean to you and your descendants in a few years? Also, how would you replace them when they wear out as all things do? We will follow the interdependence of each of our modern technologies with all the other technologies and show that eventually all chains of reasoning lead to one inescapable conclusion. Within a generation or two, your descendants would be living as people did before the Stone Age. As we go through each this list of question, remember that each question that you have to answer 'No' to is an indication of how badly your life would be if you were in Noah's shoes. It is amazing that 20th century people are so arrogant that even after saying 'no' to most of the following questions, they still think that they can make it in the wild after a global catastrophe. What 20th century people don't remember is that when Europeans educated Native American children during the last century, the children returned to the tribes with none of the skills they needed to survive in the wild. Native Americans complained that our education made their children useless--and they were correct.
...
Maybe a blanket will have to do. But after a few years, the blanket will have rotted and will need replacing. It will need replacing sooner if you allow it to get wet over and over again. Besides only one of your children can inherit the blanket. They all will need blankets, so maybe you need to take a loom to make cloth. This is a good idea since you and all your children will need clothes. A loom will be a very useful item. But where will you get the cotton? Maybe you can grow it. This takes time away from growing food. Take a loom, find some wild cotton, plant the seeds and you and all your descendants can keep warm. Sorry, cotton does not grow wild! It is so thoroughly domesticated that it will not live in the wild. Cotton is a product of mankind's biotechnology, albeit a very old one.28 Since you are not allowed to take more than one modern technology, cotton, cotton blankets, clothes etc. are out.
Can you make a loom? Do you know how to construct a loom? Do you have the tools to chop the tree down? Do you have the tools to shape the wood? Do you know how to make stone tools with which to chop the trees? Are you aware that stone tool making is very dangerous and can cost you the use of your hands if it is not done properly? John Whittaker, a flintknapping expert, severed two tendons in his hand with one tiny cut, putting him out of action for almost two years.29
You forgot something. A loom is of no value without a spindle to spin the thread. So, instead of one technological item to produce a blanket, you need three. Actually, make that four, if you consider the need for a plow to plant the cotton seed; five if you consider the yoke with which to hook up the domesticated cow, which is going to pull the plow. But then again, domesticated animals are also a product of our technology and there are none of those in this new world you find yourself in. You will need to domesticate new ones. Remember that domesticating a wild animal is more than merely capturing it. Centuries of breeding the wild temperaments out are required to make the animals docile enough to use effectively. Take cattle, for instance. The effects of domestication on animals are impressive. Asimov states,
"We have clear notions of what constitutes an 'improvement of breed' in domestic animals. If we want a cow that is a good milker, we interbreed bulls and cows that have descended from good milkers, and pick the best of the offspring (in that one respect) for future interbreeding. In the end we build up milk specialists that are scarcely anything more than living factories, designed to turn grass into butterfat.
"Fine! But what else have we bred into the cattle while we have been concentrating on the milk? We do not much care; we just want the milk. Our tame cattle are now too stupid and placid to protect their calves or even themselves against wild beasts. The thoroughbred race horse is a magnificent speed-machine, but is a highly neurotic creature that requires more and better care than a human baby."30
Well, if you can't clothe yourself with cotton cloth, what about using animal skins? Kill an animal and use the hide for clothing. Sounds reasonable until you realize that there is more to it than just killing the animal. Once the animal is dead, how do you remove the hide? How do you protect the carcass from scavengers until you can eat the meat and salvage the skin? You can hardly perform this task without a knife of some sort but you don't have one. Maybe you can make a stone knife, but what kind of rock will you use, and how will you shape it into a usable form? Do you know what kind of rock will make a good stone knife? How will you shape it into a usable form? Do you know what pressure flaking is and how to do it? Do you know the angle at which to hit a stone to make it produce flakes? Do you know how to protect yourself while making stone tools? Even if you can do this, unless you know how to preserve and tan the hide, it will quickly rot, leaving you little to wear. Wearing a rotting skin around your loins may make you a tempting morsel for scavengers such as wild dogs, wolves, lions, and bears. You and your descendants will soon be reduced to the most wretched form of existence.
Maybe you can solve this dilemma by bringing a metal plow with you on the ark. If you bring a metal plow, there are still problems. A metal plow will rust out within 50 years. What will your children replace it with? They will not have any better ability to make iron than you do. Is it really reasonable to take a metal plow when only one of your children can inherit it and the others must somehow do without it? Eventually, the metal plow becomes useless to your children's survival because it is a rusted pile of junk. Somehow a loom and a plow don't quite seem as useful as they once did.
Maybe you had better forget about keeping warm and concentrate on something more basic - food. What are you going to eat? You could take a plow anyway and plant a few crops, but what will you grow? Wheat? Well, all varieties of wheat are a product of man-made technology, and since you have chosen a plow for your modern technology, you can't also take wheat. Bread and pasta-making varieties of wheat do not grow anywhere as a wild plant. It has been so thoroughly domesticated that, without mankind's yearly intervention, wheat would be extinct. Wild wheat is a poor material for bread making. Feldman and Sears note that,
"Spikelets of wild wheat lie strewn on the ground following the fragmentation of the spikes at maturity. The main difference between the wild wheats and their cultivated derivatives is that on ripening the spikes of the wild species tend to break into their component spikelets and fall to the ground. Some of the spikelets seen in this photograph have partially buried themselves in the soil, through the action of their awns (their elongated bristlelike terminal processes) in response to wetting; the enclosed seeds are thereby ensured favorable conditions for germination and survival. Although shattering at maturity is essential to the wild wheat as its primary seed-dispersal mechanism, it must have been a major nuisance to the ancient harvesters of wheat. It is therefore not surprising that the early wheat growers selected nonshattering mutants when these appeared, thereby converting the wild wheat into a cultivated one no longer capable of surviving without man's help." 31
How about corn? Sorry, like wheat, corn also is a modern technology and since you chose to take a plow, corn is not an option. If you don't believe that corn is a man-made invention, consider this. It can't reproduce on its own. Mangelsdorf states,
"Corn as we know it is a thoroughly domesticated plant. It is the most efficient of all grasses at producing grain, but it is unable to survive without human help because it has no way of spreading its seed. The kernels on an ear of corn cling tightly to the rigid cob, and if the ear were simply allowed to drop to the ground, so many competing seedlings would emerge that in all likelihood none would grow to maturity. The ear in its hundreds of modern varieties was created by human beings for human purposes through centuries of selective breeding; it has no counterpart anywhere in the wild, or for that matter among other cultivated plants. Yet corn must originally have evolved from a wild plant. Which plant?"32
Rice is the only major grain plant that grows in the wild, but do you know what it looks like? I don't. And even if I did, I don't know how to cultivate it. How do I make the rice paddies? When do I plant the grain; when to I transplant it? When do I harvest it? Frankly, my first crop would be a disaster! If that first crop is a disaster, it is quite likely that my family will die.
Maybe you had better take wheat or corn seeds rather than a plow. That would be a better decision but still not a great one. Several obstacles stand in the way of making a crop from your planting. First, without a plow, planting the crop will be more time-consuming and the weeds will grow back more quickly, choking the young plants. Secondly, much time and effort must be extended to ward off insect pests and weeds. Like the domesticated cattle of today, the modern agricultural plants are too weak to survive without a lot of tender loving care. They require pesticides and fertilizers or they will die. Thus, the third obstacle is the amount of time necessary to care for the plants. Without pesticides, the insect pests will be extremely difficult to control unless you know how find the natural predators of the insect pests. Since you can't go to the store and buy 'good insects', your crop is at serious risk. Since it takes months for the plants to mature, you have two choices: starve before the crop can be harvested, or go hunting for food and let the crop take care of itself, which is to say that the crop will most likely die.
Couldn't you divide the labor and have your wife care for the crop while you are hunting? That all depends upon how good a hunter you are. If you can make a bow and arrows, or a spear, and are a good enough shot, you might be able to bring home enough food for this division of labor to work out. But if you are unable to do that, then both you and your wife will have to scrounge through the region looking for edible fruits, vegetables, nuts and roots. The bushmen of the Kalahari Desert live a hunting and gathering type of existence.
"They travel together in bands, each consisting of 5 to 16 families united by bonds of kinship and friendship. Each band has a recognized territory of 300 to 400 square miles, selected for its resources of food plants (which contribute the main part of the diet), wet-season waterholes (for drinking water during the six to eight weeks when sufficient rainwater gathers in pools), trees (for shade, shelter, firewood, and wood for making artifacts), and areas of grazing to attract and sustain herds of game animals. Subsistence is based on 34 species of edible plants, of which eight are staples in their various seasons. This diet is supplemented by the meat of antelope and other herbivorous mammals, by tortoises and other reptiles, and by the flesh and eggs of all but raptorial and scavenging birds. Plant-gathering is mostly done by the women ranging within five miles of the camp, while men hunt over a much larger area of the territory. The main hunting weapon is a light bow shooting flimsy, unfletched, poisoned arrows. The range is only 25 yards, and great skill is needed to stalk the quarry within this distance."33
Are you that skilled of a craftsman that you can make a bow and arrows that actually work? How difficult can that be? Do you know what "unfletched" means? Are you aware that only certain types of wood make excellent bows? All other woods can be fashioned into a bow, but it will not be a very good one. The two best types of wood for making a bow are the Osage orange, or Bois d'Arc tree, and the yew.34 Are you aware that the wood must be dried for up to three years, or the bow will not work correctly as it ages?35 Jim Hamm states,
"With yew, the longbow makers of Great Britain aged a stave for seven years. Old-time bowyers in this country maintained that a four year seasoning was adequate."36
Assuming that you knew all of this, which would be extremely unlikely, how are you going to cut and shape the wood into the proper bow form? Remember that you have no saws, files, and maybe not even a knife. And even if you have a knife, eventually your children will need to be able to make bows and arrows without the modern knife since only one of them can inherit it and the others must make do on their own. What are you going to use for bowstring? Are you aware that it is sinew that is most often used for strings in primitive bows? Do you even know how to find the sinew in a dead animal?
More than this, do you know the techniques necessary to produce a usable arrow? There are several important aspects to the problem of making an arrow. A crooked arrow will not shoot straight. Do you know where to find and when to cut arrow shaft-wood? How do you straighten them? Today, in making an arrow, a piece of wood is turned into a straight, columnal shape. But primitive man had no lathe and had to use stone tools to make the arrow true. How do you keep the arrow tip pointed in the right direction during flight? How do you attach a stone tool to the shaft? More importantly, how do you make a stone arrowhead that is symmetrical? Do you know what pressure flaking is? If your answer to any of these questions is "I don't know,", then it can safely be asserted that you are going to have problems hunting game.
Assuming you are able to make an arrow or a bow, are you able to stalk a wild animal to within a few feet of it? It is probable that your arrow's accuracy will not initially be as good as the arrows of the bushmen, so you will have to be even closer to the game than 25 yards. Finally, are you able to shoot the homemade bow and arrow with enough skill to kill an animal? The bushmen use poisoned arrows, which increases the effectiveness of the strike. A wound will eventually kill the animal. But where are you going to get poison?
This whole question of feeding yourself is quite important. If you can't successfully feed yourself, you will die. If you are not a good enough hunter, then you will have to eat only vegetable matter. But that raises another problem which makes your chance for survival even less. While the hunter-gatherer may get 66% of calories from vegetables, the third they get from meat is very important. Vegetarian diets do not provide the concentrated energy necessary for the hard life that the hunter-gatherer is going to face. And, unless a person carefully chooses his vegetarian diet, he will not get the proper mix of amino acids and may die. The difference between a meat and a vegetarian diet is shown by a discussion of how horses would have to travel to get to the ark. Custance notes,
"One reads of the speed achieved by certain animals such as deer and antelope, etc., and imagines accordingly that they could easily make the trip [to the ark-GRM]. But this disregards one important fact, namely, that such creatures are herbivorous. The importance of this observation is that those animals must spend an enormous amount of time browsing in order to gain enough energy for ordinary living. In some cases this may even amount to 80% of their waking hours. Such a circumstance leaves them little time for making long journeys through unfamiliar territory, and it accounts for the fact that a man can outrun a horse - given time - as has been demonstrated on many occasions. In spite of its strength the horse must stop to eat far more frequently than the man who eats meat."37
The whole point of this section is that the technology requires specialists; without the specialists, civilization may sink to extremely low standards of living. The present technological knowledge has replaced the ancient knowledge and may be of little use to a stranded band of survivors. What good is knowledge of metalwork when there is not enough food to live another two weeks? The need for stone tools is quite obvious from the foregoing, yet in each culture, after the invention of metal smelting, the practical knowledge of stoneworking was lost. Metal makes superior arrowheads, harvesting implements and knives. Once mankind had the ability to work in metal, why would he continue to make stone tools? The history of civilization shows that stone tools disappeared as soon as the knowledge of metal work became widespread in the culture.
...
The assumption, which seems quite prevalent in discussions of Noah, is that his technology was so easily mastered that he and his family could quickly recover a moderate level of technological sophistication and rapidly regain an agricultural society. This is a 20th century arrogance that has no respect for the level of technology described in the Bible. Biblical scholars of a previous generation taught such a view. P. J. Wiseman says,
"No more surprising fact has been discovered by recent excavation than the suddenness with which civilization appeared in the world.
...
"In the face of these facts the slow progress of early man is a doubtful assumption, and the idea that an infinitely prolonged period elapsed before civilization appeared cannot be maintained."38
"This viewpoint is quite simply wrong. With the revolution in Carbon-14 dating, which took place in the late 1960's and the 1970's, it has been proven that civilization didn't appear full-blown instantaneously. The oldest free-standing buildings were built in 3,500 B. C. on the Island of Malta, and the oldest European Megalithic monuments were built as long ago as 4,000 BC. As long ago as 4,800 B. C. at Kerkado, in Brittany, men were building passage graves.39 A baked brick wall has been found in Atlit-Yam, a submerged neolithic settlement off the coast of Israel. The village dates from around 6000 BC.40 Thus, from the earliest stone work until the building of the pyramids, over 3,000 years elapsed. Why did it take so long?
The reason is simple. Certain skills and technologies are prerequisite for other technologies. Without the basal technologies, everything else is not available."41
Noah and company were in a bad spot. And I believe their descendants head south, only because they survived better there, and finally ended up in Africa, millions of years ago.
Conclusion
The Mediterranean locale for Eden and the Flood matches exactly what the Bible describes. In previous posts I explained why science and theology say that Adam and Eve must live prior to 5 million years ago if we are to explain the diversity of and ages of human genes, and the antiquity of religion, the painful birth process, the sweating etc. This scenario matches science as we know it. I have held this view for 25 years or so, and so far, nothing has been discovered that clashes with it. If one wants a historical reading of Eden and the Flood, this is the only one that doesn't lead to clashes with physics, geology or biology. Now it is your choice to make: Believe a scenario that makes the Bible true, or stay with what you now hold to and have a false Bible.
Next: The Creation of Man
References
1. John C. Munday, Jr., "Eden's Geography Erodes Flood Geology," Westminster Theological Journal, 58(1996), pp. 123-154,p. 128-130
2. A. Debenedetti, "The Problem of the Origin of the Salt Deposits in the Mediterranean and of their Relations to the Other Salt Occurrences in the Neogene Formations of Contiguous Regions", Marine Geology, 49(9182), September, 1982, p. 96.
3.Lester C. King, Wandering Continents and Spreading Sea Floors on an Expanding Earth, New York:John C. Wiley & Sons, 1983. p. 172
4.Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean was a Desert, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 173-174
5.Picture from Fred Wendorf, Anthony E. Marks, Problems in Prehistory: North Africa and the Levant, SMU Press 1985, p. 16
6.Sergei V. Popov et al, “Late Miocene to Plioene Palaeogeography of the Paratethys and its relation to the Mediterranean, Paleo, 338 (2006)pp. 91-106
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018206001738?via%3Dihub
7.Derek Kidner, Genesis an Introduction and Commentary, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1967), p. 64
8.Joe Lampart and Nicholas Hawie, "Aspects of the Depositional History of the Levant Basin Offshore Cyprus and Lebanon," Conference Paper • March 2013 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259639010
9.Mitchell, T. C. (1996). Havilah. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer, & D. J. Wiseman (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (3rd ed., p. 446). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
10.http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/2019/51612mart/ndx_mart.pdf
11.Neil Hodgson, Petroleum Systems of the Levant, http://d8d673da5f0d55e3ea5a-6496b70fad7e6663b590babbc0242de1.r89.cf1.rackcdn.com/FP%2020.10.2015%20Neil%20Hodgson_Spectrum%20presentation.pdf
12.Kenneth J. Hsu, et. al. "History of the Mediterranean Salinity Crisis", Nature, 267, June 2, 1977
13.Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean was a Desert, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 177 see also Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn,"Island Dwarfs and Giants," Mammoths, (London: Boxtree, 1995), p. 34
14.William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 99-100
15. Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean was a Desert, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 178
16. Carlo Sturani,”A Fossil Eel (Anguilla SP.) from the Messinian of Alba (Tertiary Piedmontese Basin). Palaeoenvironmental and Palaeogeographic Implications,” in C. W. Drooger, Ed., Messinian Events in the Mediterranean, (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co, 1973), pp 243-255
17. Kurt Wise, “Faith, Form and Time,” (Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2002), p. 153
18. Anonymous, "Atacama Desert", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2, 1982, p. 254 see also Anonymous, "Deserts," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 5, p. 606.
19. Clive Gamble, Timewalkers, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 129
20. Glenn R. Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, Dallas: DMD Publishers, 1998, p. 159-160. for July temp in Mediterranean area see Howard J. Critchfield, General Climatology, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 93-94
21. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4437153.stm
22. Martin Luther, "Lectures on Genesis 2:11 in John L. Thompson, Genesis 1-11, p.85
23. Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.
24. Kenneth J. Hsu, "When the Mediterranean Dried Up", Scientific American, December, 1972, p. 33
25.William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p.84
26. Glenn R. Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, 3rd edition, (Spring: DMD Publishers, 1998), p. 168
27.D. Garcia-Castellanos, et al, Catastrophic flood of the Mediterranean after the Messinian salinity crisis," Nature volume 462 (2009), pages 778–781
28. Carl O. Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), p. 78.
29. John C. Whittaker, Flintknapping, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 3
30. Isaac Asimov, The Wellsprings of Life, (New York: The New American Library, 1960), p. 64.
31. Moshe Feldman and Ernest R. Sears, "The Wild Gene Resources of Wheat", Scientific American, January, 1981, p. 104
32. Paul C. Mangelsdorf, "The Origin of Corn", Scientific American, August, 1986, p. 80.
33. -----, "Kalahari", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1982), p. 374.
34. Jim Hamm, Bows & Arrows of the Native Americans, (Azle, Texas: Bois d'Arc Press, 1989), p. 22
35.Ibid., p. 26
36. Ibid.
37. Arthur C. Custance, The Extent of the Flood, Doorway Papers, 41, (Ottawa: Privately Published, 1958), p. 24.
38. P. J. Wiseman, New Discoveries in Babylon about Genesis, (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott), p. 28,31,32 cited in Arthur C. Custance, Fossil Man and Genesis, The Doorway Papers, 45, (Ottawa: Privately Published, 1968), p. 27,28
39. Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization, (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 99
40. Ehud Galili, et al, "Atlit-Yam: A Prehistoric Site on the Sea Floor off the Israeli Coast," Journal of Field Archaeology, 20, 1993, p. 133
41.Glenn R Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, (Spring: DMD Publishing, 1998), p. 183-188.
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