The Search for Noah’s Flood
Scientists are looking in the wrong place
Ronald S. Hendel
September 04, 2025
45 Comments
94828 views
Read “The Search for Noah’s Flood” by Ronald S. Hendel as it originally appeared in Bible Review, June 2003. —Ed.
Ronald Hendel
On my wall is a newspaper headline proclaiming, “Noah’s Ark Found in Pennsylvania! Scientist: Old Testament ship is buried in mountainside—and it looks exactly like the Bible says!” Slightly lower on the same page is another headline, “Kitty survives after being sucked into vacuum cleaner!” Now you know where I get most of my news about the Bible, once I finish my Bible Review.
Another headline about the flood has flickered on newspapers and TV in recent years. Two geologists at Columbia University made a splash when they announced that a massive flooding of the Black Sea 7,500 years ago may have been the origin of the biblical Flood legend. Shortly thereafter they published a book called Noah’s Flood about their theory.1 More recently a team of marine biologists has announced that there was no massive flooding of the Black Sea at that time, based on their study of the sediments in the sea floors of the region. So it seems that the headlines were premature. Noah’s Flood hasn’t been found in the Black Sea.
But let’s imagine that the first guys were right, and that there was a massive flooding of the Black Sea around 5500 B.C.E. What, if anything, does this have to do with Noah’s Flood?
FREE ebook: Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context Mesopotamian creation myths, Joseph’s relationship with Egyptian temple practices and 3 tales of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham.
Biblical scholars will tell you that the Flood Story in Genesis 6–9 (actually stories in the plural, since there are two versions woven together in these chapters)2 derives most directly not from an actual event, but from earlier stories. The earlier stories are from ancient Mesopotamia, best known from the Gilgamesh Epic (Standard Babylonian version, c. 1100 B.C.E.) and the Atrahasis Epic (Old Babylonian, c. 1700 B.C.E.).3 In these stories we learn of a wise man named Atrahasis (later known as Utnapishtim) whom the god Enki saves from a cosmic flood by commanding him to build an ark, put all animal species on it, and save himself and his family. The ark eventually lands on a mountain called Mt. Nimush, which has been identified with Pir Omar Gudrun, an impressive mountain in the Kurdish region of Iraq, northeast of Kirkuk. (Our marines probably have a couple of Humvees parked by this mountain around now.)
The biblical versions of this older story name the flood hero Noah, but many of the details are reminiscent of the Mesopotamian story. In his classic commentary on Genesis, E.A. Speiser concludes, “It is clear that Hebrew tradition must have received its material from some intermediate … source, and that it proceeded to adjust the data to its own needs and concepts.”4 One adjustment was to relocate the mountain where the Ark lands to a higher mountain range to the north, “the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4) in eastern Turkey. The highest of these mountains is today called Mt. Ararat, and it is nearly 17,000 feet high.
If we wanted to find the flood that gave rise to the legend of Noah’s Flood, it seems to me that we should look for a big flood in northern Mesopotamia, not one in the Black Sea. And, indeed, there is archaeological evidence for many local floods in ancient Mesopotamia, since the Tigris and Euphrates rivers occasionally flood. Even a relatively small flood can be catastrophic if it kills many people in your village, and from this local trauma a story can grow and grow, until it takes on cosmic proportions. (Compare how a battle for a Late Bronze Age city in western Anatolia became Homer’s Trojan War, in which even the Greek gods are locked in battle.)
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Many cultures have flood stories, and it is no coincidence that many cultures suffer from local floods. It is more compelling to connect these phenomena than to appeal to the melting of the Ice Age glaciers or a hypothetical flooding of the Black Sea. Stories happen. Even stories enshrined in the Bible. The best stories, of course, are a vehicle for profound insights into our relation to the world, each other, and God (or, for the Old Babylonians among us, the gods). The biblical story of Noah’s Flood is an exemplary and immortal narrative in this respect. Even if it didn’t happen, it’s a true story.
“The Search for Noah’s Flood” by Ronald S. Hendel originally appeared in Bible Review, June 2003. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily on March 26, 2014.
Notes
1. William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
2. Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 53–60.
3. See the recent translations of Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Penguin, 2000).
4. E.A. Speiser, Genesis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), p. 55. See also the superb essay of William L. Moran, “A Mesopotamian Myth and Its Biblical Transformation,” in Moran, The Most Magic Word: Essays on Babylonian and Biblical Literature, ed. Ronald S. Hendel (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association, 2002), pp. 59–74.
Related reading in Bible History Daily
The Animals Went in Two by Two, According to Babylonian Ark Tablet
Video: The Exodus as Cultural Memory: Poetics, Politics and the Past
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Let’s see if we can first find what happened to flight 350 before attempting Noah’s Arc.
In response to Biblical Archaeology Review story of Genesis flood vrs. all other ancient stories of floods
All of the flood stories are telling the same story.
With different interpretations in different eras and areas.
At the end of the last Ice Age, beginning around 10000 B.C.- 9000.B.C. there of course were enormous floods everywhere affected as the sheets of ice and glaciers melted.
It took millennia for the miles deep sheets to melt in all the various parts of planet earth affected. Not all happened at the same time.
But at the same time there were equally enormous floods of people moving from climes east that had been unaffected into the west that had been impassable.
And when the two collided (the melting ice and the migrating people) obviously there were floods of drownings.
These tragedies made quite an impression and the stories told to pass on these tragedies grew and populated from all corners of the world where the floods happened.
The stories were naturally of the families who saved themselves and so much, therefore “repopulating” the planet: Naturally..
(Hollywood screen writers were not the first to make blockbuster news that focuses on one aspect of a wide-spread tragedy.)
The Stories that were interpreted and incorporated into GENESIS of the Old Testament of the Bible tell the story of one family in the flood in that area: that of Noah. From a particular era
during the melting of the glaciers there.
It is a most important story.
As are all the others told of the families who saved themselves and their animals during those tempestuous millennia.
What will the stories be that will tell of the repopulating of planet earth after this era of Climate Change does its work?
Who will survive the deep freezes and floods that will eventually return humans and plant and animal life to this planet?
Who will eventually write that Bible?
I have not seen the film with Russell Crowe, but I would like to.
I hope before we become too “noisy” and over anticipate planet earth in her cycles of destruction and renewal.
Thank you for the interesting list of Flood Destruction stories.
Sincerely
Madeleine
http://www.madeleinedeJean.com
author of:
And The Stars Began to Fall,
From New York to Singapore, look at the rocks below your feet and you will find “Noah’s Flood.”
Why do people continue to ignore the discovery of the boat-like formation near the village of Karzan in Eastern Turkey? Is it because it wasn’t discovered by ‘credentialed’ archaeologists? If you take time to read the evidence discovered in the area, you will wonder why this discovery has been ignored by mainstream archaeology..
Most translations – other than the NIV – (which says just the opposite) say in Genesis 11:1 that after the flood the people migrated FROM the east and settled on the plain of Shinar – later the site of Babylon. Thus if one moves eastward – back in the direction from which the people migrated – one ends up in the mountains of western Iran. The traditional site of Mt. Ararat I think was not so named until the 11th century by Armenian monks. Maybe everyone is looking in the wrong place. I read one time where the oldest names of this mountain chain was a Zorastrian word which translated to “The mountains on which Noah landed.”
I just saw the previews of that upcoming film about Noah and they showed a scene with water geysers shooting up from the ground, like the verse in Genesis 8:11; “All the fountains of the great deep (tehom) burst apart.” In “The Ocean in the Literatue of the Western Semites,” A. J. Wensinck explains that in ancient Semitic cosmologies there consisted of upper waters and lower waters and that this tradition surved in the Koran and the Old Testament (p. 20):
“In the Koran there are several passages which seem to support a heavenly ocean. Sura, 55, 19: ‘He [Allah} has set free the two oceans so that they meet; between them is an isthmus which they do not transgress.’ In Sura 25,55 it is said that one of these seas is sweet, the other is salt; and Sura 27,62 also speaks of two seas which are separated from one another”
“It is well known that in the Babylonian cosmology one half of Tiamat is placed in heaven and that the biblical cosmology has a reminiscence of this mythological idea in the verse which relates that God made a separation between the waters above the firmanent and those below it”
Wensinck also explains (p.44) how the lower subteranean waters called “tehom” and translated as “deep” serve as a metaphor for a type of “spiritual distress and destruction” as in “”revive me again, and raise me up from the depths of the earth” (Psalm 71:20) and “where deep calls to deep in the roar of your cataracts; all your breakers and billows have swept over me” (Psalm 42:7).
In Babylonian cosmology the subteranean waters were the domain of the god Enki or Ea, who was the deity who instructed Utnapistim to build an ark. In “Hurrian Hebrews; Ea as Yahweh,” Forrest Reinhold writes (p.60):
“An ideogram employed to represent the deity Ea was BE. Since BE has the Semitic value, naqbu, ‘fountain,’ from the root naqabu, ‘to break through from the depths under the earth,’ it can be seen that the cult of Ea was connected with the subteranean supply of water … Ea was recognized as bel nimeqi, ‘the lord of wisdom,’ literally, ‘the lord of the deep,’ … for the word nimequ, ‘wisdom,’ is derived from the root emequ, ‘to be deep.’
That’s p. 70, not 60, of Reinhold’s book. I ordered it after seeing it advertised in the issues of BAR and it only cost $7.00 but its value is worth far more. At the time I wrote him and asked if he saw the similarities between the Babylonian Creation Epic’s account of the mingling of sweet waters of Apsu and salt waters of Tiamat and the then current theory about the fresh water lake mingling with sea to produce the Black Sea in the mid-eight millenium B.C.E. and he responded and said he hadn’t realized that possible connection. It’s interesting how that book quoted in the above article, “Noah’s Flood” by William Ryan & Walter Pittman contains an ancient reference to the formation of the Black Sea (p.103):
“In his ‘Natural History,” Pliny the Elder described the Black Sea as ‘having swallowed up a large area of land which retreated before it.'”
I wish that those who wrote these articles actually believed the Bible. I mean BELIEVE the Bible, not just try to use it as a source to piece together a version of events that they believe to be believable. You know. Believers. Would be nice. This guy doesn’t believe in the kind of flood the Bible describes. He believes it to be an exaggeration… a BORROWED exaggeration. It tells you all you need to know about his views of inspiration.
In the Bible History Daily that points to this article, Ronald Hendel is noted as teaching at “Berkeley University.” Let’s correct that to “the University of California, Berkeley.”
Why are people who believe in Jesus Christ, Christians, using the “BCE & CE” when for almost 2000 years it was and is BC & AD? How easy do we accept the “language of denial” of non-believers. If we continued to use “Before Christ” & Anno Domini” (year of our Lord) non believers would have less influence on the unknowing. This also applies to maintaining the age of the earth and correcting those that claim “millions of carbon dating flawed years,” instead of thousands of more realistic and biblical (their is more “young earth” data today) history years. Just a couple of thoughts on “supple” brainwashing by many atheists and “too easily bought $ and $ paid for by so called scientists! I include this publication and others, that follow a flaw!
As a lover of the “early sciences,” I’m sad to see or read about “new discoveries by biased scientists” whose aim seems to be “try and disprove anything biblical, regardless of how “unscientific or whatever the costs.” Many of todays scientists should write on their business cards, “Pay Us Enough $$$ Money and We Will Prove Anything, True or False, Your Choice!”