Episode 13: The Great Deep, part 1
This is the story of a storm, and the people who saw it.
All the quotes from the Bible for the main story were were taken from the English Standard Version or the New King James Version. For the other sources, including commentaries, websites, or articles, you can find links and references in the show notes below in the order they appeared. If you have any questions, there’s a link to contact me at the bottom of the page.
Show notes:
For records about the Labor Day Storm of 1935, see here. That site terms the Labor Day storm as the “most intense” to make landfall on record. I used the phrase “strongest” but that, of course, depends on how one defines a storm. For a detailed story about the storm, see here and further background here. For normal atmospheric pressure, see here. The articles on the Labor Day storm didn’t use the phrase storm surge, but referred to the effects of tides and waves causing damage to a railroad 30 feet above sea level. For the background of what causes a storm surge, see here. For the elevation of the Florida keys, see here which suggests most of the land area is 3-4 feet above sea level and here which refers to some of the highest elevations being 5 meters (about 18 feet). For the effects of 200 mile per hour winds in a storm, see here and here as well as here.
For the year the Flood occurred, as well as the year of creation, see the timeline given in Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (pg. 278). Master Books.
For a discussion of the timeline of events for the seven days preceding the start of the Flood, see show notes on Episode 12.
Genesis doesn’t give specifics about what happened outside the Ark on the morning the Flood began, but given evidence around the world, as well as the first-hand accounts we have of smaller-scale natural disasters, we can make some educated guesses.
For the idea that the world was free of clouds and rain until the start of the Flood, see discussion in Episode 12.
For how thunderstorms form, see here. For how lightning is formed, and other interesting facts, see here. For the speed of updrafts in a thunderstorm, see here.
There are more interesting kinds of lightning than just cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground lightning including things dubbed “blue jets,” “sprites,” and “elves,” some of which were only recently discovered. For details, see here.
For the prevalence of lightning in the world today, see here. For the number of lightning storms occurring around the world every day, see here.
For factors that cause certain thunderstorms to have more lightning than others, see here. For more on the Catatumbo lightning in Venezuela, see here.
If the Ark was built on top of a hill, perhaps they planted trees around it as natural lightning rods (see here. For what happens when a tree is hit by lightning, see here.
I assume the rain fell quite hard since it was a main factor in a global Flood meant to kill everything on land, but that’s an assumption. Most of the water could have come from the fountains of the deep.
For the amount of rain that fell on Reunion Island in 2007, see here. For the location of Reunion Island, see here.
For the record amount of rain in one minute, see here.
Though the Bible doesn’t say there were no volcanoes prior to the Flood, that is, perhaps, the most reasonable guess, especially if the world had a stable and rain-free environment as discussed in the last episode.
For the definition of springs and geysers, see here and here.
The “fountains of the deep” in Genesis 7 most closely describe natural springs or geysers (see lexicon reference here), but there are a few reasons to suspect that these eruptions involved more than just water. First, volcanoes were probably absent at creation. Choking clouds of ash don’t fit a common understanding of the phrase, “very good” from Genesis 1:31. This suggests that the plate tectonics we study today began with the Flood. If so, the volcanoes that often occur at plate boundaries (see here) would also first appear at the Flood. Secondly, the geology of the Earth shows evidence of very large volcanoes that are dated to times before recorded history (see here). Assuming the timeline in the Bible to be correct, these volcanoes had to occur sometime after the start of the Flood, with it most likely that they occurred during the Flood or immediately after it as the Earth settled down into its new geography. Thus, while Genesis refers to “fountains” with an emphasis on water, it is perhaps reasonable to speculate that volcanoes were also associated with the break-up of Earth’s crust.
For details on Paricutin volcano, see here, here, and here, and here.
For the suggestion that hydrogen sulfide smells like rotting eggs, see here.
For more on Mount St. Helens, see here.
For scale, Mount St. Helens released about 0.3 cubic miles of ash when it erupted (see here). Krakatoa sent up 6 cubic miles of ash (see here). Tambora released 36 cubic miles. I mentioned Tambora in the first episode of WiderBible when it was the cause, in 1816, of New England’s “year without a summer.” For more details, see here.
For the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, see here for the reference to 1 cubic mile of ash and here for the lowering of global temperatures due to the ash reaching the upper atmosphere.
For the size of the pre-historic New Zealand volcano, see here. For comparing to Tambora, I used the 530 cubic kilometer value and converted it to cubic miles. For the size of the Yellowstone Huckleberry Ridge volcano, see the image here, which also includes other large eruptions scaled to relative areas.
Even today, likely as aftershocks of the Flood, there are still more than 1500 active volcanoes on Earth. For more, see here.
For the story of Vesuvius and the destruction and rediscovery of Pompeii, see here. For the use of plaster to make statues of people in their last moments and the example of a possible family of four caught trying to escape, see here. For a plaster cast of a dog, see here. For a horse, see here. For a plaster cast of someone crawling, see here. For a cast of someone clenching their hand, see here. For the remains of people huddled together in boat houses, in this case in the also-buried town of Herculaneum, see here.
Pliny the Younger’s story of his uncle, Pliny the Elder (who died in the eruption) can be found in book 6, part 16, here.
Recent sources of acid rain were industrial, but volcanoes, perhaps a major factor in the Flood, also put out the same acid rain prerequisites that can lead to rainstorms with a pH of 3.0 as well as acid fogs. For more, see here. For acid rain erosion of marble and limestone, see here. For sources of acid rain, see here.
For the flooding of the Yangtze river in 1931, see here.
For details on the Malpasset Dam breach, see information about the town down stream, here, a discussion of causes of the failure, here, and interviews of people who lived through it here.
For details about the causes of landslides and mudslides, see here. Landslides and dam failures can combine to make disasters, too. In 1841, a landslide in Pakistan blocked the Indus river for 5 months. Then, in June, that natural dam burst sending a 100 foot tall wall of water down through the valley wreaking havoc. For more, see here.
For the landslide in Elm, Switzerland, see here.
For the events in Lituya bay, Alaska, in 1958, see here. For the height of the Empire State Building, see here.
I said “tidal wave” when I should have said “tsunami.” A tidal wave is due to the effect of tides. Less accurately, it also refers to waves caused by wind (see here and here). I should have said “tsunami.” A tsunami is caused by an earthquake or a volcano erupting under water (see here).
In the note on Genesis 7:21-24, one commentary goes so far as to make the reasonable suggestion that some of the people fleeing the Flood probably tried to grab on to the Ark or climb on top of it, only to be washed off or otherwise perish.
We assume Noah warned the people of the world about the Flood (see show note on Episode 12 for details). How many people is an open question. In terms of the world population, it is not hard to get billions or even trillions of people in the world at the time of the Flood, but that’s just based on population growth math from an assumed number of children each couple had and the gap between generations. On the note for Genesis 7:21, one source referred to calculations that offered somewhere between 11 billion and 80 billion in world population. I assume the global population was probably in the millions or billions at the Flood, but the upper bound could be much higher. For more on pre-Flood population growth, see Episode 9 and the show notes associated with it.
With the Flood, God wiped out the world Himself, but with the Canaannites (likely the same as the Phoenicians, see here) a thousand years later He delegated the task to the Israelites, trying to get them to do locally what He’d done globally. The results were uninspiring. The Israelites failed to follow-through on their orders and ended up mixing their religion with the religions they were supposed to destroy, ultimately joining in the crimes God had condemned, and then going even further than the people before them. For God’s command to destroy the kingdoms of Canaan, a region along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean sea (noted here, see Deuteronomy 7:1-5. For the results of failing to destroy the nations who opposed the worship of God, see Judges 2:1-3. For the Israelites doing even worse things than those people from the nations before them, see 2 Kings 21:9. For the years of the Flood and the conquest of Canaan, see Jones, F.N. (2015) Chronology of the Old Testament (pg. 278). Master Books.
For religion being an unavoidable part of Phoenician culture as well as examples of the places they used for worship, see here. The Phoenician Baal could refer to either a local god “a baal” or the specific head deity “Baal” according this source as well as Horn, S. H. (1979). In The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Dictionary (p. 104). Review and Herald Publishing Association. For the mythology of Baal, including incest and bestiality, see here, here, and here. For Baal fighting the deity who ruled the waters in order to become king of the gods, see here.
Asherah was associated with Astarte according to this article as well as Easton, M. G. (1893). In Easton’s Bible dictionary. New York: Harper & Brothers. It’s possible the two names were thought of as separate goddesses, but if so, Astarte was still a part of the Phoenician pantheon, so her influence on their culture remains whether she and Asherah were the same or separate deities. Asherah is referred to as a mother goddess with El as the father, and also as Baal’s consort in this reference, but I couldn’t tell if Baal was supposedly her son or came from somewhere else. For Astarte’s association with love and war, see here. For the worship of Astarte being associated with prostitution, see here.
For records of child sacrifices among the Phoenicians, see here for where it mentions them being brought to Astarte, pg. 470 here where it refers to them being brought to Molech and describes the sacrifice, and here where it suggests Molech and Baal were, at least in some cases, the same deity. For other name alternatives, see here. For comparisons of different translations, see here.) The description of the sacrifices to Molech, given in the above reference, is talking about things done during the time of Solomon, not Moses, but I assume similar things were going on previously. For more references to sacrifices to Molech, see here. The note on 2 Chronicles 28:3, here suggests that these sorts of sacrifices really took place and were not just a “passing through the fire” but literally involved burning the child. Even so, that source goes on to suggest that this was probably only done in extreme cases. For God’s direct comment against this practice, see Jeremiah 32:35.
Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians, see here. In Carthage they find the remains of children and animals underneath inscriptions that refer to sacrifices. There’s debate about whether the remains are from sacrifices or a regular child cemetery. One article supports the idea that they were indeed the remnants of sacrifices and also combats the idea that they were postmortem sacrifices by pointing out that offering an already dead child to the gods wouldn’t be much of an offering. To investigate the question further, researchers analyzed the teeth in these graves to determine the ages of the children when they died and found that infants under 3-months old are statistically over-represented in the sample, suggesting that young children were indeed sacrificed. For more, see here. On the opposite side, this article suggests the evidence points to the fact that child sacrifice occurred, but that the burial places included other children as well. That said, historical authors such as Plutarch (see here) and Diodorus Siculus (see pg. 343 here) reference the Carthaginians sacrificing children, though they’re open to the accusation of just offering Roman propaganda that vilified the Carthaginians.
As for the appeal of the Phoenician religion, that’s an open question. One argument could be the draw of hedonism in the religion as mentioned here. I imagine other things contributed to the attraction of the religion as well, including the power structure of priests and kings who could use the fear of the gods as a method of maintaining control over the population at large. One other argument for the appeal of idolatry was its low standards which were easier for adherents to meet according to Horn, S. H. (1979). In The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Dictionary (p. 519). Review and Herald Publishing Association.
Support for the idea that it really took 120 years to build the Ark can be found in the show notes on Episode 11.
For an overview of the Babylonian flood story, see here. For the gods’ agreement that no humans should be warned, see Tablet 11 here. For one god’s warning to a human, see here. There is a close relationship between the Sumerian, Babylonian, and other Mesopotamian flood stories as seen here.
For the patience of God in the instances listed in the episode, see Genesis 4:1-15 for God’s patience with Cain and Genesis 6:1-7 for God’s patience here before the start of the Flood. You can also see God’s patience in at another time when God removed a specific people group on Earth. That story comes just a few chapters after the Flood in Genesis 19 with the destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, and the other cities of the plain. In that case, Sodom was already known as an evil city (see Genesis 18:22-33 where Abraham was hoping at least 10 good people could be found in it). Two angels are investigating the city when last straw comes as all the men of the city, both young and old, gather around a house and start a riot attempting to rape the two angelic visitors. In the story, not only did God delay judgment and punishment until due diligence was finished, He rescued the only people willing to leave the city, just 3 of them, and they far from examples of virtue. (Lot is called a righteous man in 2 Peter 2:7, but it’s fair to say Genesis 19 records some significant blemishes).
For the reference to God waiting another 400 years until the inhabitants of Canaan had completed their “iniquity” see Genesis 15:13-16. That reference refers specifically to the Amorites who are included among a list of nations the Israelites were supposed to drive out in Deuteronomy 7:1-2. Presumably the other nations listed were descendants of the Amorites of Abraham’s time or otherwise behaved in similar fashion to the Amorites mentioned in Genesis 15.
Many of the features of Phoenician religion can also be found in Greek and Egyptian mythology (and other places) including the myths of Leda, Ganymede, and Europa in Greece and the mythology of Isis in Egypt. It would be nice if human sacrifice was the detail that set the Phoenicians apart, but many cultures have that as a part of their history or mythology including the Romans (see reference below), Greeks (see here), and the British Druids (see here), not to mention Aztecs and Incans in the New World (see here). Given these other examples, it’s hard to tell why the Phoenicians were singled out by God for destruction in Deuteronomy 7:1-2. Perhaps they were more committed to their religion and unwavering in following through. We can’t say for all communities, but at least in Rome, while they committed various atrocities, human sacrifice was viewed in a negative light, even if they sometimes did it, suggesting there was yet some hope for them to change (see here and here). While we don’t know for certain why God designated one group of people for destruction while allowing other groups who did much the same thing live, we can get some insight from the story of Sodom, referenced above, where God begins by saying He will investigate Sodom to see if it is altogether as bad as He’d heard (Genesis 18:20-21 giving us an indication that God doesn’t act impetuously, but with careful judgment. In short, God knows the big picture while we only dimly see part of it and, as such, can only make our best guess as to why one group was allowed to go on while another was destroyed.
For support for the idea that what people did wasn’t the real issue but rather their unwillingness to change, see Hebrews 13:8 that says that Jesus doesn’t change and John 10:30 which declares that Jesus and God are the same. 1 John 1:9 comments that sins are forgiven when we admit them, and, by extension, when we ask that they be forgiven. 1 Peter 3:9 emphasizes that God (text says “the Lord”) doesn’t want anyone to die, but to repent instead. The Old Testament bears this out as the entire collection of books is a record of people rebelling against God and being forgiven when they repent. From this, perhaps these people were destroyed because they no longer had any inkling to repent so nothing more could be done for them.
The idea that unwillingness to change, to abandon sin, is a key feature of the crimes of the Phoenicians and the people before the Flood might be supported by a statement Jesus makes in Matthew 12:31. In that passage Jesus declares that “blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.” Some commentaries consider this blasphemy to occur when someone rejects what they know to be true (see France, R. T. (1985). Matthew: an introduction and commentary (Vol. 1, p. 214). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press). Tyndale refers to it as, “Sin against the Holy Ghost is despising of the gospel and his working” (see note on Matthew 12:31, here. Perhaps the Phoenicians in the kingdoms along the east coast of the Mediterranean sea and the people living before the Flood so purposely and habitually rejected God’s call that they no longer had any interest in repenting and coming back to Him. In those cases, since God will not force people, there is nothing more He can do to save them, but that is speculation. For more, see the sentence beginning, “But if, when the Holy Ghost is given” in the commentary here.
There is precedent in other stories in the Bible for people changing their behavior and repenting and God calling off the impending disaster, with perhaps the best example being the short book of Jonah.
For the back-and-forth of a reporter and a Biblical scholar discussing the justice of God, in which the idea that God committed genocide comes up, as well as the issue of “innocent” people who died in the Flood, see here.
I try to avoid overly graphic details, but I wanted to give some sense of the types of crimes God may have been trying to stop when He sent the Flood. If the same things were going on in Noah’s day as occurred in Canaan when God sent the Israelites in to destroy the kingdoms there, God wasn’t being cruel, but merciful by stopping people intent on causing suffering to others. If God didn’t intervene, wouldn’t we accuse Him of injustice in letting such abuses go on? This is the no-win situation the Christian faces. Either God is cruel for punishing those who make others suffer or God is cruel for failing to prevent such suffering.
From our perspective today, it’s not hard to make the case that the punishment of destroying the world with a Flood did fit the crime regardless of the specifics of the crimes people were committing. Supporting this is the fact stated in Romans 6:23 that wages of sin is death, but you can see these “wages” as a punishment or as a natural consequence. God is the source of life. When Adam and Eve sinned, they rejected God and, by extension, rejected life. The fact that they didn’t die right away has more to do with God delaying the consequences of their choice. In the case of people before the Flood, God isn’t being cruel to them, He’s granting them the freedom to make their own choices, even if that decision leads to their death. If God forced the people to live when they had rejected Him, the source of life, that would be injustice for it would remove from those people the freedom to decide for themselves whether they wanted to live and be around God or be away from Him. Adam and Eve might’ve died the moment they rejected God, but God waited to see if they, or their children would change their minds before letting them have the natural consequences of leaving God, life, behind, and choosing death.
The destruction of the world before the Flood might bring up questions, but it’s interesting to note that commentaries written in the last few-hundred years don’t seem to have any concerns about the death of so many people outside the Ark. Perhaps they viewed their destruction as a fitting result for their crimes and didn’t feel a need to elaborate. Instead, more than one author discusses the death of so many animals (see note on Genesis 7:21 here, here, and here for examples) and suggest that eight people would be overwhelmed by so many animals if they’d all been left alive (see Exodus 23:28-30 for a parallel concept) or that the animals, as being under man’s authority, had to share in man’s punishment.
Assuming the parallel between the wickedness before the Flood and the crimes of the Canaanites is true, what’s more concerning than God’s judgment on the people before the Flood is the fact that today we worry about God’s injustice to those people, suggesting that modern society has come to accept those sorts of crimes as commonplace and no longer recognizes their true heinous character the way God does. For this concept, see the abstract to the article found here.
In destroying everyone in the world except for the eight people on the Ark, there’s still the problem of the “innocent” people. These people would be the ones who were prevented from getting to the Ark by others, young children who were incapable of traveling on their own, or babies below the age where they would be responsible for their choices. These “innocents” do present a problem, but only a hypothetical one. “Innocent” people are only a hypothetical idea. Genesis 6 emphasizes that the whole world was evil continually. There weren’t innocent people around, only wicked people. Regarding children, there are a few ideas. First, due to the anomaly of Noah not having children until he was already 500 (see Genesis 5:32), one article suggested that there weren’t many children in the world at this point. Second, with rampant crime, continual violence, and a society obsessed with pleasure and selfishness, people may not have had children or may have gotten rid of unwanted babies. Third, if the people before the Flood engaged in the child sacrifice that is recorded later in Canaan, perhaps few children were left. This isn’t a complete answer to the question, nor is it a proof, only some plausible explanations. We don’t know enough of the details in this story to prove God was just. Instead the Bible gives us many evidences of God’s love, and then leaves us the choice of deciding whether or not to trust Him in the instances where we don’t know enough to grasp the big picture.
One commentary (see reference below) suggests the Flood was a form of salvation for the righteous and considers the “destruction” of everyone else closer to the concept of “erasing,” which fits with the idea that God was returning most of the world to a pre-creation state during the Flood. For more, see Doukhan, J. B. (2016). Seventh-day Adventist International Bible Commentary (pgs. 138-140). Pacific Press Publishing Association.
One could argue about more “humane” ways to destroy the world than with a Flood, but the method of destruction probably needed to accomplish more than just removing the people from the Earth, it also needed to wash the world clean of the evidences of their debauchery. If God used a different method of destruction, and left the record of their crimes clearly visible, it might work as a shortcut to people in the future going down the same path. Instead, by wiping the world clean, for people to engage in the same wickedness, they would have to start from scratch and figure it out for themselves rather than picking up where the previous rebels left off. Beyond this factor, the pre-Flood world, so near to creation, was probably quite fertile despite the curse on the ground in Genesis 3:17-19. This fertility would, perhaps, have made it much easier to grow food than it is today. Maybe, by removing that fertility with the Flood, God made survival a greater challenge, decreasing the time available for people to engage in the evil that pre-occupied a world blessed with so much ease.
At the very end of the rising waters, with the Ark the only thing left, you can imagine people trying to get inside, but God closed the door, and He didn’t open it again. For God closing the door on Noah to protect him from people outside, see speculation from various commentators in the note on Genesis 7:13-16 here, the note on Genesis 7:16 here, and the note on Genesis 7:15 here.
Update: Added a show note on 8/6/2021 to point out that I should have used the word "tsunami" where I stated "tidal wave."