The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History
Illustrations by Anastasia Sotiropoulos; Maps by William Haxby

I feel it’s important to mention from the very outset that Noah’s Flood by duo-author team William Ryan and Walter Pitman does not support the Biblical concept of the Great Flood in Noah’s day, as described in Genesis 6-9. In fact, the authors barely discuss Noah or the biblical details of the Great Flood at all. Instead, they assume that Moses’ rendering of the flood is, at least, an (uninspired) version of the countless ancient flood myths passed down through family groups via oral tradition, and at most, a direct (though religiously tainted) copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The authors spend so much time dissecting the Gilgamesh flood, in fact, that I found this book’s title both sneaky and misleading. A title like Gilgamesh’s Flood couldn’t draw half the massive American evangelical readership that Noah’s Flood could, I suppose, so they went with the latter. As much as I enjoyed this book for its scientific look at history, I still feel cheated.

With that important caveat out of the way, I’d like to spend the remainder of this review by briefly summarizing each chapter, offering the authors praise where it’s due, and then sharing my own honest critique of their work. I know I’m just an armchair scholar—and one of those crazies that happens to believe that God doesn’t lie, no less!—but I feel like their research and opinions require a response from a creative type terribly interested in pre-history, and yet not of their religious ilk.

Book Summary

Prologue: “Witnesses” – The authors open with an interesting drama that follows a family of ancient refugees trying to flee the rising waters that have destroyed their home and land.

PART I: “The Discovery of the Flood Story” – Overall, this section is an exciting recounting of the various archaeologists and linguists who helped discover the tablets from Nineveh that record The Epic of Gilgamesh.

• Chapter 1: “Deciphering the Legend” – In 1835, Henry Creswick Rawlinson deciphers a Rosetta Stone of sorts at the Behistun Rock in Iran, thereby breaking the code of cuneiform and opening the door to countless secrets from the past. In 1851, George Smith translates portions of the Mesopotamian fragments.
• Chapter 2: “Conversions” – In 1837, Louis Agassiz converts the famous, staunch-deluvian archaeologist Rev. William Buckland from believing that geological changes (like misplaced boulders) resulted not from a worldwide flood, but rather from the movement of glaciers during an Ice Age. This major shift started a trend away from a belief in the Great Flood for many in the science community.
• Chapter 3: “Visions of Palaces” – From 1835-51, Austen Henry Layard digs in Baghdad at Nimrud between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, verifying the historical existence of many of the Old Testament kings (ca. 838 BC).
• Chapter 4: “The Face of the Deep” – George Smith, now in 1872, continues to discover and translate the remaining portions of The Epic of Gilgamesh. He knows the Biblical account but doubts divine authorship, instead determining that Moses merely borrowed from other ancient texts and legends, giving it a Hebrew flavor. Smith died in 1876 before he could complete his research of the countless fragments from the Nineveh library.
• Chapter 5: “Ur of the Chaldees” – Charles Leonard Woolley digs in 1922 and discovers what he thinks is an actual flood deposit. He writes a sensational book in 1929, but his findings are later debunked. The authors then relay other theories, such as the number-counting James Ussher whose calculations place the creation of the Earth “on the evening before Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.” (56) Another theory shared is that of James Hutton whose pre-Darwin ideas actually sound a whole lot like Darwin! As for the Diluvial Theory, “Its remaining proponents are the Christian fundamentalists and the movement in the United States called Creationism.” (56)

PART II: “The Discovery of a Real Flood” – This section follows more modern scientists—including the authors themselves—and they discover and trace the evidence that points to a catastrophe in the region of the Black Sea. “Using the tools of the ocean sciences, climatology, radiocarbon dating, anthropology, genetics, and linguistics, a new group of explorers will again probe the prehistory unveiled by Rawlinson, Smith, Agassiz, Layard, and Wolley.” (57)

• Chapter 6: “Hidden River” – In 1961, the U.S. research vessel Chain heads to the Black Sea and makes some interesting discoveries about currents and silt.
• Chapter 7: “Gibraltar’s Waterfall” – Author Bill Ryan makes his first appearance (73) as he serves on the Glomar Challenger in the Balearic Sea near Spain in 1970. When drilling for a core sample, the “Hit something hard!” which ended up being gravel made up of such a small sampling of minerals that the mystery came more from what it didn’t contain than what it did. In this and further core samples, they discovered dead algae 5-7 million years old, seeds, and fossilized roots. They go on to describe how the Mediterranean Sea was once a sea, then a desert, and then a sea again.
• Chapter 8: “Vanished Deserts” – John Dewey in 1971 and author Walter Pitman are challenged to find a more recent catastrophic flood that would have been witnessed by Homo sapiens sapiens. Catastrophes, of course, haven’t been the norm during our planet’s history. As the authors put it: “Stability is indeed the handmaiden of diversity in the long march through the corridors of planetary evolution. Global change provides the punctuation for the Earth’s story.” (99) The clues for such an event that the authors sought was evidence of people forced to migrate from their former territories.
• Chapter 9: “Pontus Exenus” – In 1969-70 evidence is discovered that the Black Sea had at one time been a sea, but that it later became a large fresh-water lake, and eventually a sea again. This final stage occurred at some point in recent history.
• Chapter 10: “Red Hill” – Jiri Kukla of Red Hill in Czechoslovakia (behind the Iron Curtain at the time) risks his neck to meet with Western scientists at a conclave in Paris in order to share his incredible findings of a hill containing layered rock that dates back further than any other yet discovered. Wally Broeker, the man he meets, eventually creates a uranium chronometer which can reach farther into history than carbon 14 ever dared. With the results of some uranium testing, Ryan and Pitman lose heart about their objective “for two decades. Then one day the Iron Curtain came tumbling down.” (117)
• Chapter 11: “Aquanauts” – In 1993, the authors join Petko Dimitrov and discover an ancient river 450ft below the surface of the Black Sea.
• Chapter 12: “Immigrants” – With graduate student Candace Major, the authors take small core samples that reveal certain mollusk species and desert sands far below the surface where they simply oughtn’t be.
• Chapter 13: “Close Encounter” – They dig deeper and collect many important samples, but almost lose it all to the intrusive KGB.
• Chapter 14: “Beachcombers” – Still in 1993, Glenn Jones challenges the theory that layers gauge time. He instead uses an AMS which counts atoms rather than layers. Through his research, he concludes that the Black Sea was catastrophically filled with salt water about 7,500 years ago—well into the age not only of Homo sapiens sapiens, but of local agriculture.
• Chapter 15: “Back of the Envelope” – With the help of many scientists and researchers, the authors gauge the former levels of the fresh-water lake (350ft below sea level), the point of breakage (“directly north of the Bosporus’s entry into the Black Sea”, 160), the rate of flow (0.5-1 mile per day), and an overall picture of how the region looked from 12,500 years ago until now.

Part III: “Who Was There and Where Did They Go?” – This fascinating section traces the genetic and linguistic histories of people back to a source in the region of the Black Sea.

• Chapter 16: “Anybody There?” – All research the authors discover seems to point to a moist history for the region during the time periods when the Black Sea had supposedly dried out. This trend was reversed, however, when David Harris challenged the idea of consistent warmth with the evidence of a mini-Ice-Age from about 10,500-9,400 B.C. called the Younger Dryas. (172) With this information, they explore further evidence of Neolithic villages dating from their target time period and within view of their quarry.
• Chapter 17: ” The Diaspora” – They trace possible trajectories for various people groups based upon discovered village sites.
• Chapter 18: “Family Trees” – The authors offer a crash-course in “genetic drift” and language evolution, incredibly backtracking grammar and phonology to “languages no longer spoken and never written.” (210)
• Chapter 19: “The Gushar’s Song” – They introduce how linguists and histories have traced epics and myths through oral traditions passed down through countless generations. “Oral epic presents a composite picture of the past” (222), they say, supporting the common theory that myths and epics hold just a kernel of truth but are otherwise fanciful and colored by individual religion and culture. They share this to imply a deep mythological relationship between the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah.

PART IV: “The Flood Stories Told” – In this final section, the authors finally get around to talking about Noah, but still only minimally and in the context of flood myths from across the world.

• Chapter 20: “On a Golden Pond” – This chapter reads like a biography of the Dead Sea region and makes a good summary for their entire theory, that the Mediterranean Sea broke through a natural dam above the Bosporus Straight, inundating the fresh-water lake 350 below sea level with salt water, killing everything in the lake, and forcing the inhabitants to flee.
• Chapter 21: “Other Myths” – In this final chapter, the authors finally get around to mentioning Noah and Genesis 6-9 at length (a few pages), though of course in the context of myth. Their unstated conclusion is that the kernel of truth in the biblical account can only possibly have come from this local catastrophe 7,500 years ago.

Epilogue: “A Telling of Atrahasis” – As if to remind their readers that they aren’t really concerned about Noah’s Flood (in their book titled Noah’s Flood), the authors end their book by quoting a different flood myth with the apparent intention of leaving us all satisfied and convinced. It was this final audacity that really roiled me.

Some Praise for the Book

I cannot deny that the Ryan-Pitman team delivered a very thought-provoking book about “pre-history”. They write with such flair in many parts of the book that I was reminded of 1421: The Year China Discovered America or other entertaining works based upon historical assumptions. Chapter 10 felt a little bit like a chapter from a spy novel. And I will probably recommend to some friends Chapter 18 with its introduction to linguistics and genetic drift. Most importantly, these authors have convinced me through their professional observations and research that a major flood occurred around the Black Sea about 7,500 years ago. That a major flood occurred, however, does nothing to disprove that another, greater Flood occurred at any point prior. They didn’t convince me that this Black Sea flood was Noah’s flood, but again, they didn’t try very hard to convince anyone of that, despite their title.

Critique of the Book

As I’ve stated, my major critique of Noah’s Flood, honestly, is the title. The authors fail on 99.2% of their pages even to reference (or attempt to reference) Noah and the global nature of his flood, so I doubt they even wanted to reference it. Perhaps some chump at Simon and Schuster figured it would garner more sales from the Christian community with a biblical-sounding title. Perhaps it was a ploy by Ryan and Pitman themselves. Whatever the case, I felt totally cheated by the deception. They should be ashamed of themselves.

To critique their book properly, then, I must work under an assumption (likely faulty) that the authors actually did intend to disprove the biblical account as a mere copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which they (unconvincingly) argue could only have described this Black Sea flood. My critiques will deal simply with the timing of the event and the timing of the stories.

To introduce my critique of their timing of the event, I must say that I’m glad they mentioned the ridiculous theory proposed by James Ussher whose calculations place the creation of the Earth “on the evening before Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.” (56) I’ve long been annoyed by such foolishness in the Christian community. People that still believe such nonsense (yes, most often in the Fundamentalist denominations) make the rest of us Bible-believers look like idiots. The Bible is not a calendar, and back-tracking the ages of men listed in biblical genealogies as a means of uncovering the age of the Earth is a fool’s errand. Thanks to Francis Schaeffer for pointing this out to me so clearly in his short book, No Final Conflict. Such freedom can be had when we Christians (yes, we Bible-believing, God-fearing children of God) stop holding to ridiculous, outdated theories simply because they once came from Baptists, and instead start using our brains within the liberating confines of the Bible.

Foolish Christians that believe science can’t prove that this earth is millions of years old need to glance just once at a star sparkling 15 billion light-years away and realize that history’s as easy for God to create as is anything present or future. And foolish evolution-leaning Christians need to realize that if they want to serve the God of the Bible, they need to serve the supernatural God who could have created this moving earth in its expanding universe 20,000 years ago just as easily as (and more in line with the logic of Scripture than) hundreds of millions of years ago. To both, I say without hesitation: “Stop minimizing God! Magnify the LORD with me! Let us exalt His name together” (Psalm 34:3). With this introduction, I feel like you know exactly where I’m coming from: I’m a reasonable Creationist, and I hope such thinking finally catches on.

Now regarding the authors’ timing of this great flood, I have no reason to argue against the Black Sea flood having occurred in roughly 5,500 B.C. In fact, such a local catastrophe helps provide even clearer, historical answers to the spread of various people groups away from the present-day Middle East and into regions that they normally might have avoided. To suggest that this local event from 7,500 years ago need prevent the possibility of any prior, far more catastrophic event simply doesn’t gel. Proving something happened doesn’t disprove that something similar hadn’t also happened many years before. If the authors were trying to suggest as much, then their logic is terribly faulty and disappointing. Again, blame the title for my assumptions about their intent.

Two things to note about their research. First, they apparently studied the Earth’s evidence only until this great flood of 7,500 years ago—and if I’m wrong on that statement, please correct me—meaning that they failed to study far deeper into geological history (i.e. far deeper into the silt at the bottom of the Black Sea). What lies beneath? Might they find evidence of a far larger flood deeper still? Again, proving that something occurred doesn’t prove that something else never occurred.

Second, the authors mention that when this flood occurred, “the speakers of the Semitic tongues climbed through the hills to the south.” (235) If they truly intended to argue against Noah and the biblical account of the flood in his day, then they ignore how this statement contradicts the Biblical timeline (i.e. that Shem was a son of Noah on the ark and that God didn’t confuse the languages and disperse the people until an untold number of years following the flood at the Tower of Babel, not as waters speedily chased the inhabitants from their land). They ought to have attempted to attack this statement, but again failed to do what their title promised.

Overall, there’s just too little attempt to marry the timelines of the Black Sea Flood with the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible even to offer me a moment’s doubt. Suggesting that a single, massive flood in the Middle East 7,500 years ago must necessarily be the source of every flood myth in human language is a very faulty deduction, which brings me to me to my second critique, the timing of the stories.

The clay tablets that record The Epic of Gilgamesh predate Moses’ Pentateuch by a large span of years. This fact cannot be denied. And I’m not about to argue whether The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the Great Flood or the Black Sea Flood—that’s beyond my experience, and so Ill take the authors’ word for it. When considering oral traditions, however (which the authors discuss at length in Chapters 18-19), they never convincingly proved that the written recording of an ancient oral song determines when the song was actually created.

Setting the subject of divine inspiration aside for a moment, it’s neither un-Christian nor un-biblical to believe that almost everything recorded in the book of Genesis (and the book of Job) had been oral tradition in the ages prior to the time Moses came onto the scene to write them down. I have no doubt that Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph (among others) shared and sang the stories of their lives to their children and taught those kids to do the same eventually. By the time Moses was called by God to write His law, Moses himself had likely already memorized all those stories, so at this point He was mainly getting it from God’s point of view. Would Moses’ prior knowledge of his people’s history (both the human race and the Hebrew race) negatively impact God’s ability to breath out His Word to the prophet in a perfectly concise, monotheistic way? Hardly. Thus, to suggest that The Epic of Gilgamesh‘s earlier recording necessitates Moses’ having stolen from the epic is preposterous. Similarities in themes needn’t mean they came from the same source, merely similar experiences. Better historians wouldn’t try to slip that one by their readers.

Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book. It ignited my critical thinking, boosted my confidence in the fidelity of God’s Holy Word, and convinced me once again that I can believe in science without compromising my reasonable faith in God. It’s a liberating way to live, friends, believing that God is not bound by nature (He can do anything He pleases), by time (He created a universe billions of years old, yet not all that long ago), or by unbelief (He is the only Way, Truth, and Life). Never fear science. Don’t give up on Truth. “Magnify the Lord with me, and let’s exalt His name together!”

©2018 E.T.