Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History

Rating:
Summary: Away all boats!
Review: In NOAH'S FLOOD, oceanographers turned authors William Ryan and Walter Pitman propose an alternative scenario to Noah's tempest in a teapot.

With the help of other scientific disciplines - archeology, linguistics, geology, climatology, biology, paleoanthropology, paleography, paleontology - Ryan and Pitman hypothesize that the Great Flood tale in the Book of Genesis, as well as similar myths in older cultures, actually had as its source an apocalyptic flooding of the freshwater New Euxine Lake around 5,600 BC when the Adriatic, 500 feet above the lake, broke through the Bosporus isthmus and poured seawater into the former at a rate of ten cubic miles per day for at least a year, raising the lake's level six inches per day over that period, and forming the present-day Black Sea over perhaps two years. The water bill for that one must have been astronomical; don't try this at home.

The authors argue their case methodically. First, they describe a proven precedent, i.e. when the Atlantic breached the junction of North Africa and Spain at Gibraltar roughly 5 million years ago to flood a vast desert and create the Mediterranean. Second, they present data derived from underwater sonar scans and seabed core sampling that give evidence of a Black Sea basin that was originally a glacial melt-water repository, which subsequently shrunk through evaporation until it was those hundreds of feet below an Adriatic Sea swelling (like the rest of the Earth's oceans at the time) with that same glacial runoff. Third, they postulate the nature of the human residents that bore witness to the inundation of their lakeside homes and fields and subsequently fled towards all points of the compass to higher ground. And, more importantly, how the collective memories of the event were preserved and transmitted down through subsequent centuries in oral and written tradition. How far did those refugees flee? Amazingly, Ryan and Pitman have them and their immediate descendents traveling as far west as Paris, as far south as Egypt, and as far east as Chinese Turkestan.

The book included a few small maps, which were adequate, and some scattered drawings, some apparently based on photographs, that were pretty much useless as illustrative aids.

NOAH'S FLOOD is a fascinating and convincing exposition, especially if you don't take the Bible's Noah as "gospel" and you haven't been exposed to any other scientific explanation of the event. (I don't and haven't, and don't intend to ponder further an ancient people's mad rush to the boats. One credible explanation is satisfying enough. I'll leave the controversy surrounding the Ryan-Pitman theory to the theologians, historians, and scientists, who have turf to defend to the death.)


Rating:
Summary: Good Research
Review: The research involved in this theory is quite excellent and intriguing. I quite enjoyed reading of how they came to this theory of the Great Flood actually being the result of the Black Sea being flooded from the Mediterranean. As the story of the flood is to be found in many different cultures -- including Navajo culture -- there must be some basis to the flood story. This is quite plausible.

Rating:
Summary: Finding the truth
Review: This was an excellent book and did an outstanding job of relaying the facts to the reader. I am totally convinced that this was Noah's flood. However, the authors left out information that would actually support the biblical narrative. For one thing, they disregard the fact that looking at various other cultures, the biblical narrative is the closest to the origninal and to their scientific findings. What is more, if you take the biblical narrative in its historical context and learn what the words meant to the early Hebrews (The Bible wasn't written in English), everything fits together really nicely. Also, they acknowledge that every language known to the Hebrews would have spread from the same region shortly after the flood, but they completely ignore the biblical story of the tower of Babel, which, surprise, comes right after the flood. It is obvious that there is a non-christian slant on the authors' opinions, but with a little bit of pulling out the facts and detective work, your faith in the Bible can only be strengthened. If I was vindictive I'd knock the book down for it's non-christian slant, but the authors did an outstanding job of getting the point across given their presupposition that the Bible is wrong. Peace out, and enjoy.