Genesis 8, after the Flood

Chapter 8 begins with the phrase that God "remembered" Noah. God had not forgotten Noah! This is where idioms are needed to be known in order to get the meaning of the text. To "remember" someone in the old Israelite culture meant to express concern and/or act with loving care toward someone. (NIV text note)

Then we see that the waters receded when a wind blew over them. The word translated 'wind' here is 'ruah,' used 379 times in the Old Testament and translated as 'spirit' 176 of those times!

Was it the Holy Spirit or a wind? Or both?

Then we see that both the springs of the deep and the 'windows of heaven' or the 'floodgates of the heavens' had been closed up. And the water receded.

I learned from Dr. Bernard Northrup, a Hebrew scholar, that there is something interesting in Genesis 8:3 that none of the translators of any of the editions evidently understood. The KJV says "And the waters returned from off the earth continually..." The NIV states, "The water receded steadily from the earth." The 'continually' and 'steadily' were their way of dealing with the fact that the verb indicating the recession of the waters is repeated.

Dr. Northrup feels that the intent of the writer was to indicate a back and forth motion of the receding waters, a coming and going.

The Bible says that after the 150 days of the water rising (from chapter 7), the waters immediately started to recede, or go down. This can be easily understood if one realizes that the areas under the crust where the water had been stored and heated were now empty and the crust itself would have to settle into them. This sort of movement is referred to as "downwarping." And the waters would have started to settle quickly into the downwarped areas.

But there was a LOT of water to drain off the earth now as the crust settled in places. The Bible says that in the seventh month the Ark touched bottom somewhere in the mountains of Ararat (and people are still looking for its remnants!), but we see in verse 5 that the tops of the surrounding mountains did not even become visible for another two and a half months!

And I keep thinking about the desperation Mrs. Noah must have felt with all those mice and rats populating into the hundreds and thousands in a year! Ychhh!

Eleven months after he and his family and all those animals boarded the Ark, Noah sent out a raven. It just kept flying back and forth! So Noah switched birds and sent out a dove. The dove found no place to land the first time and came back. But the second time Noah sent out the dove, it returned with a fresh olive leaf! Things were growing out there in that new land! Noah's heart, and the hearts of his family must have leapt with hope and the thought of an end to their floating zoo.

A week later, Noah sent out the dove again, and this time it did not come back.

It has now been a year since Noah and crew boarded the Ark. Noah took the covering off the Ark. The sky must have looked so beautiful to him after all that time! What the Bible mentions, though, is that he saw the land was dry. Evidently it was only 'relatively' dry, however, for Noah waited another month and a half before the ground was completely dry.

But then it was God who told Noah to get off the Ark. Get off and go, all you animals and people, and replenish the earth!

And so they all disembARKed (ever wonder where that word came from?).

And Noah, righteous man that He was, immediately built an alter to the Lord and sacrificed some of the clean animals on it.

The Lord's reaction to this is to be pleased. And the Lord says something interesting at this point:

"Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood." The Lord has more to say than that, but pause there for a moment.

Many people say the Flood was to destroy evil. Obviously that is not what happened! For evil continues to be the steady inclination of man's heart from the time he is little! Keep in mind that if something is inclined in one direction, it is a struggle -- it takes work -- to keep it from going that way. We do expect all people to learn to exert self-control over their evil desires, but the fact that so many laws are needed, and our jails are so full, shows that these inclinations often rule our lives and we simply don't always have what it takes to keep fighting them! It is not until Christ kills the old nature and grants a new nature with a spiritual rebirth that a person's heart no longer inclines toward evil, but rather toward the good, wanting, finally, to please God.

So while the Flood may have wiped out some of the effects of evil, it did not wipe out evil itself.

I would want to add a point here. Many times I have heard challengers to the Bible say how cruel God was to kill all the little babies and children as well as the adults in the Flood.

Think about this from God's point of view, though. The world has become so violent and so evil that there is only ONE man who is different! What chance would any of those children have of growing up to know about God? They would be irreversibly condemned to a live learned to be cruel, violent, and evil. The option to this? Take them now to heaven before that can happen. As Peter will say several thousand yars later, God is not willing that one should perish.

And so the children were killed along with all the other people. And then in heaven with the Lord. Safe, secure.

The final comment on this chapter is, from the point of view of science, a very important one.

Here is what we read, with only slight variations, in all the English translations:

"As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease."

There is a strong consensus among many creation scientists that the earth's axis was tilted at the time of the Flood. This would cause seasons where there were none before. The mechanism for the tilt could be a meteorite hit and/or the force of the explosions of sub-crustal waters at the time of the onset of the Flood. Because there was one large supercontinent at that time, the waters exploding over land would all be one one side of the globe while waters exploding upwards under the seas would lose some of their propelling power due to the water buffering them. This could easily, with that kind of force, have the necessary power to shove the earth over a little.

Is this what the words of the Lord are indicating by reference to the seasons? It didn't make sense to me because of the "day and night" at the end, which had been instituted on the first day of creation week!

So I called my husband in Australia (we have the Pacific Puddle between us right now!) and mentioned my query. Why were 'day and night' there?

He looked at the oldest manuscript he has -- a print of the Alexandrian Septuagint. This was translated by Hebrew scholars themselves from paleo-Hebrew into Greek about a hundred years before Christ was born.

Here is what it says:

"All the days of the earth,
seed and harvest, cold and heat, summer and spring, shall not cease by day or night."

THAT makes sense! That may well be indicating a whole new world!

[ June 06, 2002, 12:38 PM: Message edited by: Helen ]

 

I'm sorry to get to this so late, Glen. My other time on the forums during the day are breaks during various jobs I have to do, either on the net (editing) or in the house, yard, etc. For this forum I like uninterrupted time.

OK You asked about an ice age after the Flood, land bridges with a lowered sea level, etc.

This is jumping ahead a little, but the Bible seems to indicate in chapter 10 that the continental division took place for the most part catastrophically several hundred years after the Flood, not during it, although it is very possible the lines of vents through which the Flood waters exploded were the incipient crustal plate boundaries. At any event, the migration of animals off the Ark would have been essentially over the one supercontinent, probably now pockmarked by numberous swamps and lakes and rivers, remnants of Flood drainage.

If you look in Job 38:29-30, you will see something that sure looks like a reference to an ice age during the time of Job. Job may very well have been Peleg's nephew, as we will see when we get to Genesis 10 tomorrow. So we do have the timing for this ice age.

However there was also another one, and this is very clear in the geologic record. I did not go into this as part of the Bible study, because it is not in the Bible, but scalding, exploding sub-crustal waters are not going to fosslize anything. There is a VERY good possibility that 99%+ of the fossils we see today are post-Flood.

I'll see if I can explain it quickly, because it has to do with the geologic column and that has to do with your question about the ice age(s).

The heating process inside the earth may have been caused by radioactive decay of heavy elements, both the long and short half-life varieties at once. My husband, Barry Setterfield, has done extensive work (as you know) on the possibility that the speed of light was much higher in the past. Some of his material can be seen at a website he was given here:
www.setterfield.org

If his theory about the speed of light being much faster in the past is true, then radioactive decay was also going on much faster, and thus the short and long half-life elements deep within the earth (they were not at the surface then), would have caused enormous heating. We know the earth started cool, from Genesis 1:2, which states that the Spirit hovered over the surface of the WATER. Water steams up at very low temperatures when talking about the universe and stars and such, and totally boils off given slightly more heat.

So the earth heated from the inside, and this part is Biblical logic.

This drove the waters out of the rocks and toward the surface, which is why Genesis 2:5 indicates that water from the surface watered the ground all over the earth. The pressure was building.

God warned Noah and the Ark was built and readied and loaded. On the proper day, when they were all in and safe, and presumably pretty far from the vents which were about to explode, all hell broke loose, and I don't think that is a 'cussing' word used there! It must have seemed like that to those who were scalded to death and/or drowned.

About half the oceans' waters were outgassed during that Flood. That means that that volume of space, one way or another, was now empty under the earth's crust.

And so the crust downwarped severely in some areas, collapsing into the now depleted aquifers. This would have created giant river valleys as part of the drainage system. These river valleys would have stayed steamy hot as waters were still seeping out, and keeping them very warm and wet. Too wet and too hot for humans, but wonderful for some kinds of plants and animals.

And it was in these areas that geologic activity would have continued on a relatively constant basis for several hundred years. Collapsing parts of the earth would have quickly buried a lot of the flora and fauna of the region, with the highly mineralized waters there to enable fossilization.

The reason I am going into all this is because the geologic record is the build up of materials after the Flood, probably from the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary up.

And thus we do see evidence of two distinct ice ages, and not one.

Whew! Took some time to get there!

The first ice age was, indeed, after the Flood and before Babel. It was caused by a very humid atmosphere combined with a high axis tilt and as the water vapor was carried to the poles, it then precipitated as snow -- great quantities of it! This packed in on itself, forming the great ice sheets which were the first ice age.

This would not have lowered the ocean level significantly because the moisture from the hot flood waters was already in the air and the land was still sopping wet and swampy in many places and these areas were also evaporating. Since there was still water seeping up from under the crust in places, there was some water replacement on the surface and so this, also, would have prevented any significant drop in ocean level.

The second ice age occurred after the time of Peleg, which was several hundred years after Babel. This is the one I referenced in Job. This ice age was again caused by massive moisture in the atmosphere due to a catastrophe which we will get into more later and also a slight change in the axis tilt of the earth.

By this time, however, people and animals had already migrated to various parts of the world and so the need for any significant land bridges between the now broken up continental masses was not a necessity.

I hope that answers your questions. I am going to ask Barry to make sure we have some of his recent essay material up on his website in the next week so that it can be referenced for a lot of what I have mentioned here. I think his model is solid. It is based on the Bible as well as on what is seen astonomically and geologically. When key issues are dealt with, all the witnesses line up to tell the same story which the Bible tells and refers to in areas where the telling is brief.

It is already late, and because this particular area of discussion might raise more questions, I will leave it for now and postpone Genesis 9 until tomorrow. It just doesn't seem right to rush through this when I know there is so very much controversy involved in this section of Genesis.

 

What are you lost about? If you are lost, so are others. Ask questions. Any questions you have will also be in the minds of others not as brave as you to ask them! NO question is stupid. Not in my book!

 

No, I wouldn't mind a bit. In the meantime, we got two essays up on Barry's site today, one on the stars and the other on the geology and the catastrophes.

http://www.setterfield.org/stellarhist.html -- A Brief Stellar History

http://www.setterfield.org/earlyhist.html -- A Brief Earth History

(These newly posted essays have not been thoroughly checked for formatting errors yet. If you see one, please alert us! thanks)

Please PLEASE remember that Barry is not BIBLE! He makes sure everything he models conforms to Bible, as God's Word is always first, but that does not make him right! This is primarily a Bible study here and I only went into this to answer questions. I personally think Barry is right (and I thought so as well before I married him!), and we are getting an awful lot of email from physicists around the entire world right now asking for more information and saying this is sounding good to them. But it's a new model and the minute things get confused you should all copy me in at least one thing: shut it out of your mind and go back to Bible! God knows what happened, and He knows what He wants you to understand right now.

So please don't anyone worry.

OK, I'll be back later to do chapter 9 of Genesis, but if this thread keeps on going as well, that's fine. Contributing to any thread after it is past its particular day is encouraged.

[ June 07, 2002, 10:02 PM: Message edited by: Helen ]

 

Oh my goodness! The world may end! the posts are out of order!!!

I'm so glad you are digging and interested! That means everything. The posts are labeled by chapter so people can put them in any order they want by going back and forth if there are comments or questions and no one will get lost.

You think I am organized or something???

In other words, don't worry about it!

Those are two different things, as you know. The gap theory was an effort to force the Bible to fit what science has proclaimed are the long ages of the universe. Since there really is no getting around the fact that Genesis presents creation as a six day event, an effort was made to cram a few zillion years in between the first and second verses of Genesis.

But that doesn't work. There are fossils on both sides of the ice age strata. That means there was death before the ice age. But the Bible says death came through one man, Adam. There are a number of other points which don't allow for a gap between those two verses, but I'll give you just three more that are right in my mind right now.

1. If the fossils had been before Noah's Flood, they would have been buried and destroyed completely and certainly not cropping up here and there around the world!

2. The Hebrew grammatical structure forbids a gap between those two verses. If you need technical stuff on that, let me know and I'll post it. But essentially, the first verse presents the grand sweep of it all, including both heavens and earth. The Hebrew wording is very clear about the next sentence -- it is one specifically pointing to one of the items in verse one and starting to expound upon it. The heavens are mentioned in verse 1 but then the focus immediately narrows to earth until day 4, when the sun and moon are mentioned. But they also are mentioned in relation to earth!

3. Exodus 20:11 is very specific about the creation of everything in six days. No gap. No lost ages.

4. Here's another one for a bonus: in Ezekiel 28:13-14 you will find God addressing Satan through the King of Tyre. Satan is said to have been created to be the guardian cherub of Eden! So he was NOT around before that, evidently.

Now, about the rain. I was taught the same thing you were. But as I grew up and learned more science, and then taught it, it bugged me. Water evaporates. When it cools it condenses. Were the day and night the same temperature before the Flood? I have a hard time with that. Maybe it only rained at night over the seas, I don't know, but even if the temperature stayed the same all the time, water was going to evaporate. What would happen to it?

So I stared at Genesis 2:5-6. It doesn't say it didn't rain before the Flood! It says that there was no rain before the shrubs sprang up! Before there was a man to work the ground. That's when there was no rain. But yes, the streams or mists (or both) seeped up and watered the whole earth. The more I looked at it in different translations, the more I realized it didn't say that it didn't rain before the Flood!

But what about the rainbow? Why would that be special AFTER the Flood and not before? Why would God say He was setting it in the clouds -- where it had evidently not been seen before? OK, it has to be day to see a rainbow. That meant, at the least, that there was no rain during the day over land. But Noah seems to have known what God meant when God told him it was going to rain for forty days and forty nights. How did Noah know what rain was? It must have rained! At night. When things cooled down. At least over the seas and maybe along the coastlines if not over the land. Noah knew about boat-building. That means he at some time during his five hundred years up to that time, had lived near the coast and maybe even been a boat builder for awhile. These are all guesses, but I had to put things together so they made sense. That is what I came up with. Think about it and let me know how your thoughts turn out, OK?

The other thing that fell into place with all this was the new axis tilt of the earth after the Flood. God mentions seasons. The fact that there would be rain over land during the day (for a rainbow to happen so people could see it) is added evidence that there were now winds which would blow the clouds over the land. Winds come from hot/cold differences in the environment. A tilted axis would provide that on a strong seasonal basis.

If all this pushes and pulls another way for you, please let me know!

As far as the ice age goes, there were two. One shortly after the Flood and the other after the time of continental division. See how much you understand of my husband's work here, and feel free to email or post questions about it here, OK?
http://www.setterfield.org/earlyhist.html

Yeah, I talked about it a little, but no problem! The Flood waters erupted from the ground probably along vent lines. My husband's guess is that these lines became the continental boundaries later, but at the time of the Flood they would only have been the lines of explosive waters. The actual separation would come later. I'll be doing Genesis 10 tonight and that comes with that, OK? After the Flood I would not be surprised, however, if the incipient continental boundaries downwarped, or sunk, resulting in hot, steamy river valleys.

The encouragement is deeply appreciated.

[ June 09, 2002, 12:07 AM: Message edited by: Helen ]