[wendy1946]

It is a dogma of establishment science that the tale of the biblical flood is a fairytale or, at most, an aggrandized tale of some local or regional flood. That, however, does not jibe with the facts of the historical record. The flood turns out to have been part and parcel of some larger, solar-system-wide calamity.

In particular, the seven days just prior to the flood are mentioned twice within a short space:

Gen. 7:4 "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights;...

Gen. 7:10 "And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."

These were seven days of intense light, generated by some major cosmic event within our system. The Old Testament contains one other reference to these seven days, i.e. Isaiah 30:26:

"...Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days..."

Most interpret this as meaning cramming seven days worth of light into one day. That is wrong; the reference is to the seven days prior to the flood. The reference apparently got translated out of a language which doesn't use articles. It should read "as the light of THE seven days".

It turns out, that the bible claims that Methuselah died in the year of the flood. It may not say so directly, but the ages given in Genesis 5 along with the note that the flood began in the 600'th year of Noah's life (Genesis 7:11) add up that way:

Gen. 5:25 ->

"And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years and begat Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.

<i.e. he lived 969 - 187 = 782 years after Lamech's birth>

And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years and begat a son. And he called his name Noah...

<182 + 600 = 782 also...>

Thus we have Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood; seven days prior to the flood...

Louis Ginzburg's seven-volume "Legends of the Jews", the largest body of Midrashim ever translated into German and English to my knowledge, expands upon the laconic tales of the OT.

From Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews, Vol V, page 175:

...however, Lekah, Gen. 7.4) BR 3.6 (in the week of mourning for Methuselah, God caused the primordial light to shine).... God did not wish Methuselah to die at the same time as the sinners...

The reference is, again, to Gen. 7.4, which reads:

"For yet seven days, and I shall cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights..."

The note that "God did not wish Methusaleh to die at the same time as the sinners" indicates that Methusaleh died at pretty nearly precisely the beginning of the week prior to the flood. The week of "God causing the primordial lights to shine" was the week of intense light before the flood.

What the old books are actually telling us is that there was a stellar blowout of some sort either close to or within our own system at the time of the flood. The blowout was followed by seven days of intense light and radiation, and then the flood itself. Moreover, the signs of the impending disaster were obvious enough for at least one guy, Noah, to take extraordinary precautions.

The ancient (but historical) world knew a number of seven-day light festivals, Hanukkah, the Roman Saturnalia etc. Velikovsky claimed that all were ultimately derived from the memory of the seven days prior to the flood.

If this entire deal is a made-up story, then here is a case of the storyteller (isaiah) making extra work for himself with no possible benefit, the detail of the seven days of light being supposedly known amongst the population, and never included in the OT story directly.

Greek and Roman authors, particularly Hesiod and ovid, Chinese authors and others, note that small groups of men and animals survived the flood on high places and on anything which could float for a year. I do not see an essential contradiction between this and the biblical account. Noah's descendants were probably unaware of anybody else surviving and wrote the story that way.

[truthfinder9]

Many think that the flood accounts point to the same catastrophe that ended the last Ice Age, see The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith. The Hebrew of the Genesis flood account is written in such a way (that usually isn't translated well into English) that suggests it is only describing Noah's immediate area. Hence, possible survivors elsewhere.

[truthfinder9]

So while there is evidence of a catastrophe that ended the last Ice Age and could have caused Noah's flood, genetic studies put Noah further back (from Is the Truth Out There?: Why do genetic studies trace the first human woman to about 60,000-50,000 years ago and the first man to 47,000-35,000 B.C? Perhaps Genesis has the answer. In the account of Noah and the flood, all men on board the ark were blood related, the women were not. So the most recent common ancestor of the men would be Noah. The women could trace their common ancestor to Eve (see Chapter 13 for more on these studies) a few thousand years earlier.... So what about the Ice Age event then? The Bible talks about it too: Does the Bible contain any other possible references to this past? In Genesis 10:25 there is a brief, enigmatic reference to Peleg’s day as the time “earth was divided.” Does this refer to the final collapse of the land bridges at the end of the last Ice Age?

[RobbyS]

Numbers like seven and Forty do not have our significance. As to what says says, well, speculations have huge floods happing at the end of the ice age.
For instance, the seabed of the Mediterranean is to have been a desert until the inland sea whose remnant is the Black Sea, was inundated when the rising waters broke through at the Dardanelles. A natural explanation is that Genesis has a cataclysmic historical event embedded in a story about human beings and the God of the Bible. The story is related to the Creation stories and aims to identify the God of the Creator God, as a righteous God who is offended by man’s sins but always offers them hope for reconciliation. The gods of the Mesopotamian myth, like the Olympian gods, are quite a different sort.

[winodog]

I believe God made Earths atmosphere different then it is today. Thats one reason people lived much longer and the earth was more like a paradies with fruits and veggies growing everywhere.

There was a canopy of water that surronded the earth before the flood. It protected us from the Sun and everything from asteroids to comets.

The light you mentioned is interesting because that may be what made the water canopy fall to earth.
I have not heard of that before and would like to learn more. Thanks for bringing that to my attention

[calex59]

Let me say I am not particularly religious, but would be open to belief if not for one over riding fact.

Here is the problem: Where did the extra water come from? There is only so much water on earth, not enough to cover the entire land mass of the world. If extra water(enough to flood the world)came from some external source where did it go after the flood? It couldn't simply evaporate because it would then rain back to earth again and the waters would never recede as there would be no place for it to drain off to.

Therefore this was not a world wide flood, it had to be localized to some specific area. Granted, God might be able to produce enough water to flood the world and then siphon it off somewhere into space but if he has that kind of power(and he would have) why bother with water? Why not just kill the sinners outright as he did with Sodom and Gomorrah? Why go through the whole messy business of a flood?

I don't think he chose to drown the world with non-existent water, I think a local flood caused such a catastrophe that it was written up as a world wide calamity(which it would certainly seem like considering the state of communications at the time).