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

William Ryan and Walter Pitman

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) 319 pp., $25.00 (hardback)

The story of a great flood figures prominently in the imagination of the West: The Bible tells of a deluge wrought by a displeased God who then gave humanity a chance to begin anew. But we now know that the story of a devastating flood was told in many ancient civilizations—some of these stories are even earlier than the Biblical account. The oldest of them involves a hero named Gilgamesh and was recorded by the Sumerians around 2700 B.C. It was probably retold by the Akkadians about a thousand years later, and it appears in the tales of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites and Canaanites. Moreover, old Hindu texts in ancient Sanskrit also contain an Aryan flood story called Rigveda, and a number of flood myths were recorded by the ancient Greeks.

During the 19th century, geologists sought proof of a universal flood throughout western Europe—to no avail. Geoscientists William Ryan and Walter Pitman, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, are the latest to undertake the search.

In Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History, Ryan and Pitman present a fascinating theory of how an actual deluge around 5600 B.C. may have been the source of the ancient flood stories. They argue that this flood was not a devastating global event, but one limited to the Black Sea. At the time, the Black Sea was approximately 500 feet below sea level and was a somewhat smaller lake, around which many people probably lived. Ryan and Pitman postulate that the continuous rise in sea level since the end of the Ice Ages caused water from the Mediterranean Sea to spread through the Bosporous Strait into the Black Sea, then a freshwater lake (today the Black Sea is salty, like the ocean; it is not a salt lake like the Dead Sea). Astonishingly, it took only two years for the water level to rise 330 feet, inundating 60,000 square miles of land. Soon the Sea of Azov, north of the Black Sea, was also flooded. Within just a few years, the water covered an area the size of Florida.

The hydrology and bathymetry (watercurrents and depth) of the Bosporous Strait provide evidence of this geologically instantaneous event, as does core material retrieved from the subsurface around and in the Black Sea by Russian and American scientists (including Ryan and Pitman). A distinct sedimentary sequence was found and traced from the present-day shore to between 520–550 feet below the surface water of the Black Sea. From bottom (oldest) to top (youngest), the sequence was composed of a thick layer of stiff clay containing mud cracks filled with sand and fossil plant roots, a layer of sand and gravel containing shell debris of freshwater and slightly salty mussels, and an olive-gray mud containing mussels adapted to seawater. These layers showed a transition over time from land (the stiff clay, roots and mud cracks) to the underwater muddy sediments at the bottom of the Black Sea today (olive-gray mud with mussels). The distinct sequence indicated that the water level of the Black Sea had changed significantly.

The key to Pitman and Ryan’s flood theory was determining whether the water level of the Black Sea changed gradually (say, over millions of years) or instantaneously. In order to test this, mussel shells from the 059lowest portion of the olive-gray mud, presumed to be the first immigrants from the Mediterranean Sea after the flood, were pulled from core samples taken along the shallow water slopes across to the deeper sediments of the Black Sea. Carbon 14 dating of the shells across this shallow-to-deep transect, or horizon, would show whether the shells were all of the same age—proving an instantaneous flood—or whether they showed a range of ages, indicating a slower rise in water level. Amazingly, the carbon 14 dating showed that the mussel shells across the Black Sea transect were all pretty much the same age—about 7,500–7,600 years old! This is convincing proof that the flooding of the Black Sea was instantaneous, at least on a geologic scale.

The scale and speed of this flood must have terrified the populace. Ryan and Pitman propose that the flood may have scattered peoples versed in agricultural practices across two continents, into eastern and western Europe as well as across the Takla Makan Desert into western China. The change from hunter-gatherer societies to stable farming communities in Europe around the sixth millennium B.C.—Europe’s so-called Golden Age—may have been catalyzed by this great migration to escape the Black Sea flood. For thousands of years, the story of the flood may have been handed down among cultures spread throughout Europe; eventually, the flood saga metamorphosed into myth.

In a fascinating interwoven tapestry of interdisciplinary inquiry, Ryan and Pitman draw subsidiary evidence for this flood theory from geologic, archaeologic, paleoclimatic, paleontologic, linguistic and human genetic data. Never before has such a theory been so thoroughly researched across so many disciplines.

The book is clearly, and at times lyrically, written. Curiously, it is written in the third person, with the two authors as important characters in the unfolding drama. Though unusual, it is a logical literary strategy that allows the investigative events to unfold as a narrative—much as the flood story was supposedly handed down through the generations by storytellers before the advent of the written word.

Moreover, passages explaining scientific evidence are directed to an educated layperson, and every important aspect of the theory is presented in detail. Understanding all the arguments, however, requires frequent reference to the various maps. It would certainly have been easier if a large map had been available in a back pocket for consultation.

As any good scientists would, Ryan and Pitman claim that most of the subsidiary data they present are merely circumstantial. The geologic evidence, however, is compelling. Ultimate proof for this theory would be the discovery of remains of human habitation underwater at the correct depth in the present-day Black Sea. In 1998 sonar revealed “shapes that are too large for a shipwreck and too regularly shaped to not be manmade,” according to team member David Mindell, of MIT. Early reports indicate that they have found an ancient coastline 450 feet below today’s water level. This past summer Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanicwreck, and a team of scientists began using sonar and sampling techniques to look for traces of human settlement in the Black Sea. Stay tuned for further developments!

The Israelites in History and Tradition

Niels Peter Lemche

(London: SPCK; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998) $25.95 (hardback)

Copenhagen’s most famous son is Hans Christian Andersen, whose fairy tales have enchanted children for more than a century. One of Andersen’s best-known tales is “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which an emperor’s pride—and his fashion sense—are exposed by an innocent child. The adults all see that the emperor is naked, but they hold their tongues. Only the child points out that the emperor has no clothes.

While reading The Israelites in History and Tradition, a new book by one of Copenhagen’s eminent Biblical scholars (Lemche is a professor at the University of Copenhagen), I couldn’t help but think about the fairy tale. I kept looking for the emperor’s clothes, but I never found them. The emperor—or at least the thesis advanced in this book—claims to be wrapped in finery, but I side with the child. The emperor stands exposed. The child was right.

Lemche’s thesis is indicated by the scholarly allusion in his title. In 1975 John Van Seters’s book Abraham in History and Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press) amply demonstrated that it is impossible to locate the “historical Abraham” in the surviving body of extra-Biblical evidence and that theories that claimed to locate him in history were untenable. Following the same approach, Lemche argues that it is impossible to locate the “historical Israel” and that scholars who claim to do so are wholly wrong.

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Lemche concludes, “The Israel(s) of the Old Testament showed itself to be a product of a literary imagination.” He argues that the fictitious picture of ancient Israel was a product of “the Jewish law religion” of late Persian and Hellenistic times. The followers of this religion, Lemche says, “constructed their own origin myth as a program for taking over a country which they reclaimed for themselves in spite of the inhabitants who already lived there.” In other words, the Biblical writings stem from a Jewish nationalist ideology of the fourth or third century B.C.E. and were essentially a creation of this group. The Hebrew Bible has its origins, in essence, in a Zionist myth of the late Second Temple period. Lemche writes, “At the end we have a situation where Israel is not Israel, Jerusalem not Jerusalem, and David not David.”

Aside from the controversial modern politics of such a view, is there any evidence to suggest that Lemche is correct? He surveys the extra-Biblical evidence for an ancient Israel and finds that one cannot discern a particular Israelite ethnic identity in the historical documents of the Iron Age (1200–587 B.C.E.). He notes, however, that there are clear references to Israelite society in the extra-Biblical documents. The northern kingdom is often referred to as the “House of Omri,” and the southern kingdom may be called the “House of David” (though Lemche still seems to think that the “House of David” inscription from Tel Dan is a forgery, a position that other skeptics have abandoned).^a But Lemche argues that these references “are not telling us anything particular about the ethnic composition of the two states of Israel and Judah.” Hence, the Israel of the Hebrew Bible is nowhere to be seen.

The problem with this view is that Lemche fails to state what would constitute a bona fide historical reference to the Israel recognizable in the Bible. Kings are mentioned in inscriptions, but this isn’t good enough for Lemche. Place-names are mentioned, but this doesn’t count either. The name Yahweh and even “the Temple of Yahweh” are mentioned (though Lemche does not cite the latter),^b but this, too, is mute evidence, as far as he’s concerned. So what kind of evidence is Lemche waiting for?

To my mind, there is ample evidence that Lemche fails to mention. We have numerous Hebrew seal inscriptions of people named in the Bible, particularly from the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C.E., that attest to the existence of these people in the right time and place. How could religious zealots five hundred years later have known these small details? Moreover, the study of historical linguistics of Northwest Semitic languages corresponds neatly to the chronology of the Biblical writings that scholars have deduced on other grounds. How could Jews of late Persian and Hellenistic times have accurately reproduced the linguistic features of pre-Exilic Hebrew when these features had been dead for hundreds of years? The verbal system had changed, the sounds of certain Hebrew consonants (e.g., samekh) had changed, spelling conventions had changed, the syntax of numbers had changed, and more. How could these late writers have known to spell Moses with a shin or the Ammonite king Baalisha with a samekh (and to locate him precisely at the right time), or to use an extinct verb form (the “Qal passive”) in the “early” books? All of these features argue against Lemche’s thesis (and many more could be adduced). But he fails to address any of them.

If the evidence for the polity of ancient Israel is well established—and the inscriptional and linguistic evidence for pre-Exilic Hebrew is extensive—then why does Lemche go to such pains to advance such an unlikely thesis? Why claim that the Hebrew Bible is a late Jewish forgery? I don’t know why someone would stake such a claim, and I would hesitate to speculate. Perhaps the child in the Andersen fairy tale could tell us.

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

William Ryan and Walter Pitman

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) 319 pp., $25.00 (hardback)