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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > June 2003

The Search for Noah’s Flood

Scientists are looking in the wrong place

By Ronald S. 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 […]

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Endnotes

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.