ANALYSIS: In Search Of Noah's Flood

ANALYSIS: In Search Of Noah's Flood

By RICHARD OSTLING

NEW YORK (January 22, 1999 12:10 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - What?! New scientific proof demonstrating that the great biblical flood actually did occur thousands of years ago?

Such is the sensational but speculative implication in the new book "Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History" (Simon & Schuster, $25) by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. The authors are adjunct geology professors at Columbia University and senior scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Some biblical fundamentalists have expended great energy searching for the remains of Noah's ark. However, before they break out the non-alcoholic champagne to celebrate, they should know that the two scientists see no evidence for a worldwide deluge in line with a strictly literal reading of Genesis 7.

But geological research does find reason to believe there was indeed a vast, sudden and deadly flood around 5,600 B.C., close enough to the possible time of Noah to fascinate biblical literalists and liberals alike.

The Ryan-Pitman scenario was first publicized in a British television documentary in 1996. The following year they laid out the technical data in the journal Marine Geology, but that scientific report avoided the all-important links with the biblical flood that are central to the current book.

Till now the best stab at modern scientific corroboration of the flood was the work of British archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley, who caused a sensation with his 1929 book "Ur of the Chaldees," said to be the most widely read archaeology book ever published.

Digging in present-day Iraq at the site of ancient Ur, birthplace of the first patriarch Abraham, the Bible-believing Woolley found an ancient blanket of waterborne silt without human remains. It was evidence of a deadly flood that appeared to substantiate Genesis.

But Ryan and Pitman say later scholars learned that this silt layer covered only a few square miles. Thus it was no more significant than many other localized floods in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The Ryan-Pitman candidate for the great flood locale is what we know as the Black Sea, bordering Turkey to the north. In 1993, Ryan and Pitman joined a Russian expedition on the Black Sea and used the latest technology to examine evidence of geological patterns, soil layers and forms of aquatic life that existed in ancient times.

One telltale clue: Freshwater mollusks with smashed shells gave way to saltwater creatures that had intact shells, a biological transition that could be dated through carbon-14 testing of the shell remains.

From such research, the scientists spin this scenario:

Until about 5600 B.C. the Black Sea was an inland fresh-water lake, considerably smaller than today's saltwater sea and lying far below the level of the Mediterranean Sea. Then the sea waters broke through a natural dam that existed at the Bosporus strait, the waterway adjoining present-day Istanbul.

The flood was unusually sudden, powerful and deadly because sea waters were driven by the full force of the Mediterranean. It lasted a long time because all the world's oceans continually pushed in new water to keep the Mediterranean at constant sea level.

By their calculations, the water would have rushed through at 50 mph with the power of Niagara Falls 200 times over. The waters inundated farmlands and drove the surviving inhabitants into other regions, including the areas to the south where flood stories were to be written down.

Surely, the authors contend, such a radical and frightening flood would have been burned into the permanent memory of the survivors and succeeding generations.

But the weak link in their theory comes right there. Could the flood story have been preserved for thousands of years before it reached the form we know from the biblical Genesis and the similar narrative in pagan Babylon's Gilgamesh epic?

The geologists think that's not a stretch; others will doubtless disagree.

Biblical purists will note that Noah's flood was caused by rainfall, not the onrushing oceans depicted by the geologists. Also the biblical flood was temporary, not permanent as in the new theory.

Further input from Bible experts would have made this book even more intriguing. Among the matters Ryan and Pitman do not explore:

Is there any correlation between the "mountains of Ararat" where Noah's ark eventually hit ground, according to Genesis 8:4, and the peak known as Mount Ararat in present-day Turkey, not all that far from the shores of the Black Sea?

And does their estimate that the Black Sea surge lasted for 300 days have some relation to the nearly identical ten-month period in Genesis 8:5 between the start of Noah's flood and the receding of the waters?