Noah—Extraordinary Evidence

The beauty, the power, the authority, and the supernatural accuracies of the Word of God are staggering.  These Words send forth judgment unto victory, and all those who embrace them will find the doors of magnificent plenty opened unto them.  For over 6,000 years, Satan and his minions have challenged, defied and ridiculed God’s Holy Writ, only to find themselves cast into the dung-pile of life, heirs to their father’s eternal doom.  Satan and his standard-bearers have failed at absolutely every level.  They have failed sociologically, medically, scientifically, academically, economically, politically, and of course they have failed at the very root, spiritually.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Jesus Christ has made a way of escape—a new and living way.  This living way requires a covenant with God made by sacrifice, and that sacrifice is surrendering your whole being to the dictums of Christ’s Holy covenant.  The beginning of this glorious journey is called Born-Again.  This is a place where you become a new creature, where all your sin and shame is washed away, where you receive a new name, a new father, a new family, a new purpose, a new promise, and a new destiny.  This is a place of peace and fulfillment that defies natural understanding.  Are you ready to begin the journey, the end of which is eternal life in Christ Jesus?  Today is a day of good news for you.  Today is your day of salvation.  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for immediate entry onto the Highway of Holiness.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Genesis 7:1-24:

1.  And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

2.  Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

3.  Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

4.  For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

5.  And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.

6.  And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

7.  And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.

8.  Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls, and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,

9.  There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah.

10.  And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

11.  In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

12.  And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

13.  In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;

14.  They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.

15.  And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.

16.  And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.

17.  And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

18.  And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.

19.  And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

20.  Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

21.  And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

22.  All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

23.  And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

24.  And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

MAN SAID: The deceased Carl Sagan, as referred to in Discover, November 2006, in the following brief line, “Devout readers may object to Sagan’s presumption that belief should be hostage to rigorous experiment.  Yet Sagan is often identified with the epigram, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’” [End of quote]

Now THE RECORD.  The Sagan challenge above suggests that the Bible makes “extraordinary claims” (and he refers to all belief systems) but lacks the matching “extraordinary evidence.”  He also claims that the Scriptures dodge scientific scrutiny.  The book reviewer in the Discover article, mentioned above, also had this to say about Sagan: “Sagan seeks truth of a demonstrable kind.  As a puckish example, he wonders why the book of Genesis didn’t include God-inspired truths....”  [End of quote]

True students of the Scriptures are left scratching their heads in incredulity.  The evidence that supports the extraordinary claims in the Bible is in fact extraordinarily massive.  The empirical data is truly daunting, and as far as holding the scriptures to “rigorous experiment,” the Word of God does not flinch.  The Word of God endorses and encourages close analytic scrutiny. 

I Thessalonians 5:21:

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

Presently on GodSaidManSaid, there are 338 feature articles, making up approximately 2,650 typical book-size pages, certifying the full and complete veracity of the Word of God.  We welcome the challengers to offer up their contrary positions.  Often their charges are published on this website.  In the face of all contenders, God’s Word, as found in the majority-text Authorized King James Version, is the SOLID ROCK.

Three dedicated feature articles, and three notable references, dealing with the mountains of data regarding the Bible’s extraordinary claims of the global flood in the days of Noah, are hosted on this site, and the information continues to pile up.  At the end of this article, we will list the six subjects for your perusal.

What is the cause of the blind denial by the ungodly?  One science historian, speaking of the worldwide flood, put together the following words: “...vulgar notions of a universal flood.”  Revelation 22:10-12:

10.  And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.

11.  He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

12.  And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.    

In the Scriptures, Noah’s name is mentioned 49 times.  References to the disaster of the flood of Noah (I’m confident) easily exceed the 100-mark.  The account is referred to by Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Peter, Paul, and the Lord Jesus Christ.  A special note concerning Methuselah: he was the Bible’s oldest man, living to the age of 969 years.  He died the year of the flood.  His name means, “When he dies, judgment.”

Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea, who lived from 260 to 341 AD, wrote concerning Noah’s Ark.  In a 2006 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, the following passage is found: “One of Eusebius’s sources, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, tells his readers that the remains of Noah’s Ark are still being shown at Mt. Ararat.  Josephus writes: “Until now the remains of (the ark) are pointed out.” [End of quote]

David Rohl, in his book, Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation, writes concerning excavations at the very ancient city of Ur.  Ur, one of the first cities mentioned after the flood, was excavated by the famed archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley.  The following excerpts concerning Woolley are from Rohl’s book:

During his famous excavations at the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, between the years 1928 and 1934, Sir Leonard Woolley unearthed a thick alluvial silt deposit deep down beneath the modern surface of the site.  At first it appeared that his workmen had reached virgin soil upon which the earliest settlement at Ur had been built.  But the clean zone of the silt at the bottom of the excavation pit still appeared to be several metres above the surrounding ground level beyond the ruin mound.  Woolley was not convinced by his foreman’s protestations that their work was finished in the sounding and that it was pointless for him to dig deeper.

I do not like having my theories upset by anything less than proof, I told the man to get back and go on digging.  Most unwillingly he did so, again turning up nothing but clean soil that yielded no sign of human activity; he dug through eight feet of it in all and then, suddenly, there appeared flint implements and fragments of painted al-Ubaid pottery vessels.  I got into the pit once more, examined the sides, and by the time I had written up my notes was quite convinced of what it all meant; but I wanted to see whether others would come to the same conclusion.  So I brought up two of my staff and, after pointing out the facts, asked for their explanation.  They did not know what to say.  My wife came along and looked and was asked the same question, and she turned away remarking casually, ‘Well, of course, it’s the flood’.

Woolley later describes his discovery as ‘eleven feet of clean, water-laid silt’ within which no archaeological artefacts could be found.  This was in direct contrast to the levels immediately above and below the deposit which were littered with pottery sherds.  Analysis of this pottery showed that the sterile layer lay on top of the high quality Ubaid 3 pottery phase and within the very last pottery phase of the Ubaid Period.  In other words this ‘flood layer’ almost immediately preceded the Uruk Period.  It was clear that the agent which brought the sedimentation was water.

... microscopic analysis proved that it was water-laid, subject to the action of gentle currents, and it was composed of material brought down from the middle reaches of the Euphrates.  [End of quote]

Again, Rohl on the flood:

I have proposed that Gilgamesh was a kind of the late ED I Period and that Enmerkar reigned in the earlier Uruk IV Period.  As both these Sumerian rulers came to the throne after the flood, we can only conclude that the catastrophic event, remembered in both the biblical and Mesopotamian tradition, occurred in the archaeological era known as the Ubaid Period and that Woolley was right all along to identify his silt deposit at Ur with the biblical flood.  The deluge struck towards the end of the Ubaid Period and was probably the catalyst for the important cultural changes which took place in the succeeding Uruk Period.  [End of quote]

Hundreds of civilizations have left records of the great Biblical flood.  If this flood was global, then these records should also be unearthed in the western hemisphere, and they are.  One example is cited by David Rohl on page 181 of his book mentioned above:

Until fairly recently we knew very little about the traditions of the Meso-American civilisation of the Mayans because their written language had not been completely deciphered.  We now discover that they were exceptional record keepers who had developed an historical calendar going back several thousand years.  It is therefore of considerable interest to me to know that the date of their cataclysmic flood is given as 3113 BC.  [End of quote] 

Dr. John D. Morris, author, scientist, and President of the Institute for Creation Research, wrote an article in the June 2007 issue of Back To Genesis titled, “Where Are Dinosaur Tracks Found?”  He made the following observation: