Did Noah’s Flood Cover the Whole Earth?

There are several reasons to think that the Genesis flood was not global, but rather a regional event. “Regional” does not mean the flood was a small event, but rather a large land mass in a particular region flooded by a deluge.

1. Genesis 4-6 tells us the reason for the flood was to bring judgment upon sinful humanity. According to Genesis, the whole human population lived in what today we call the Middle East, so only a flood big enough for that part of the world was required. A global flood would have been serious overkill—literally!
2. When modern people read the English translation that the flood covered “the whole earth,” we naturally assume this means “all of planet Earth.” But the Hebrew word used here is eretz, which is best translated as “land” or “ground.” What the Hebrew text is actually saying is that “all the land” was flooded. When the flood eventually dissipated, the Bible then says, “the eretz was completely dry” (Genesis 8:14). It is pretty clear this doesn’t mean the whole of planet Earth was completely dry, because then there would have been no oceans, lakes or rivers left. This shows that the Hebrew text is not using eretz to mean “planet Earth,” but rather “the land,” meaning the dry land mass, where the humans described in Genesis 4-6 are living prior to the flood (i.e., the Mesopotamian flood plain, etc).
3. Ancient Near Eastern authors writing in biblical times often used a phenomenological perspective, meaning they wrote of how things appeared from the human perspective rather than from a technical, scientific perspective. For example, when Jesus says that “the sun rises” (Matthew 5:45), he is speaking in terms of how it appears to people on Earth, rather than from a technically correct, post-Copernican perspective of the earth rotating around the sun. And when he says that the “mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds” (Matthew 13:32), Jesus means that it is the smallest of seeds that people living in his time and place are aware of – i.e., they didn’t know about orchid seeds, which are even smaller. The Bible often talks about regional things, or limited human perspectives, in language that we can easily misunderstand as technical, scientific language. For example, when we read in English that the flood covered the “high mountains” (7:19), it’s important to know that the Hebrew word used here is har, which most often refers to “hills” rather than “mountains.” It is quite possible that har is referring to the hills in Noah’s region, rather than the mountains of the Himalayas. Some folks will say, “but Mount Ararat is quite high.” However, there is no evidence that the present-day Mount Ararat is the same “Ararat” referred to in Genesis, as this mountain received its name in more recent times. Contemporary scholars just aren’t sure where the ancient Ararat of Noah’s day is located.
4. If the flood was a global event, this poses a number of perplexing problems. For example:

• A global flood with enough water to cover Mount Everest would have nowhere to run off. Yet the Bible describes the flood as abating with wind over several hundred days (Gen. 8:1).
• The mingling of freshwater and saltwater produced by a global flood would have killed all freshwater life. Yet freshwater life, including freshwater fish, still exists.
• A blanket of water that covered all mountains would have also destroyed all dry land vegetation. But obviously land vegetation did survive the flood, since the dove in Noah’s story finds a “freshly plucked olive leaf” (8:11).
• A global flood raises the question of how all animal species from around the world could have traveled to the ark. Even if God miraculously transported all the animals of Earth, the ark’s dimensions are too small to house tens of thousands of different species plus enough food for an entire year (Genesis 6:21).

1. Finally, archaeologists and marine explorers have found evidence of a massive regional flood in the very area of the ancient Near East indicated in Genesis. This flood dates to around 5,000 BC—a period of time that fits well with a traditional dating of the Genesis flood. This is known as the Black Sea Deluge hypothesis.

Recommended Resources

• “Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?” in Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology by Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy
• The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate by Tremper Longman, III, and John H. Walton