You can actually argue, pretty well, for a regional local flood
using nothing but Scripture.
One of the possibilities is that the flood was not global in extent.
I mean, think of the world as a globe like we do.
We are typically going to be reading Genesis 6 through 8, really 6 through 9,
but 6 through 8 is the flood story proper.
And we assume that the language there describes a worldwide i.e. global Cataclysm.
The entire world was covered with water.
Now, it's probably not news to you that there are other views of the flood.
One of them is that it was a local or regional event.
And I don't mean like, Oh, there's a lot of water in the parking lot, you know.
No, we're talking hundreds of thousands of square miles,
that basically would have encompassed the eastern Mediterranean region,
all the way, you know, south into what is now desert, all the way north into,
like the Caucasus mountains, I mean, some huge regional flood event.
It's not global, it's regional, so it's smaller, but it's massive,
it's unthinkably large, but it's not global.
And so some people opt for this.
And this is really created in apologetics especially, a lot of arguing between,
people who would think that unless you believe in a global Cataclysm,
a global flood, then you can't be taking the Bible seriously,
you're trying to change it, you're trying to accommodate science, and so on and so forth.
And that's actually a big debate, again, in apologetics and websites
and YouTube channels and whatnot.
But for the sake of our question, there's something to think about here.
Let me just show you something.
I'm going to go out here to our link here in the slide, and we're going to go to a website
and what I did one day, because I get a lot of questions about this.
And I don't really care what view the flood anybody takes, you know,
for me, it's like, well, you know, whatever.
I mean, there is a flood, as long as we affirm a historical flood I'm good.
But I put this on my blog, and linked to part of this debate, you know,
Twenty-One Reasons Noah’s Worldwide Flood Never Happened
This is written by somebody who is a local flood person.
And in the course of this article that I linked to on my blog,
what you're looking at here is my website, the guy does, you know, sort of,
there are parts of it again, that make it sound like he's thinking about modern science
and geology and how the flood couldn't be global.
And so that might be motivating a little bit.
So what I decided to do was, look, you can actually argue pretty well,
for a regional local flood using nothing but Scripture.
And so what I did here was I wanted to show readers, okay,
I don't really care if this is the view, I mean, I'm not committed to it.
I can't call it my view.
But I want people to see that if someone holds this view, they're not being anti-biblical.
And so you can read this on the web, it's free, so on and so forth.
There's no obstacle to getting it.
What I do here is I take all of the phrases in the flood story, like "all flesh",
"all the earth", all this all that, that we used to argue a global Cataclysm
and I show how "all", that Hebrew word for "all" which is kol,
and all flesh, all humankind, it shows up the same phrase.
The identical phrase will show up in other passages where it can't possibly mean
every square inch of the world or every human being that exists.
And so I raised the question by doing that well you know, if we look at this
"Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians,
for the famine was severe in the land of Egypt.” Okay.
We have here in Genesis 41:56 and a few other places in Genesis.
Again, is it really all the land of Egypt?
Do all the peoples of the world, every person like the people in Australia,
the people in what is today the Arctic? Do they really come to Egypt to eat?
You know, the people in New Zealand, are they really coming to Joseph
and the Egyptians to get food? No,
the all language there is what it is, but it's still restricted to being a region,
a part of the globe.
So what I do in this, again, it's more or less the thought experiment,
where you have all + whatever noun found in the flood story that it can't speak exhaustively.
You know, it's not exhaustive totality. Let me just give you a couple here.
This is the geography of Eden. This is the Four Rivers of Eden.
"The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole, there's the word kol,
land of Havilah."
So the whole land, the whole area, it's the whole earth,
this is the same phrase you'll find in the flood story.
We find it here in Genesis 2, where you have this river, one of the Four Rivers
flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
And so I note here, are we really being asked to believe that every place,
every square inch of Havilah was infiltrated by this river?
Well, that's just absurd. I mean, you got to be able to stand somewhere.
When we think about the context, we know that "all whatever" isn't really all,
it's like a portion.
Nevertheless, we use these phrases. Same thing for the Gihon.
1 Samuel 14:25, and all, kol, all the lead (the kol 'eretz), All the land
(and this is referring to the people in the land) entered the forest,
and there was honey on the ground.
The word kol presumes “people”, but are we really to believe that every last person
of the land of Israel, much less the whole earth,
entered into a single forest to get honey to eat?
No, we know intuitively that this is not how we're supposed to read.
So I don't want to spend too much time on this. But what I do and this again,
is the show Look, the people who would sort of opt for this idea
do so not from science in mind.
When it comes to how do you get the Nephilim after the flood?
The reason they do it, the reason why the local flood becomes option number two,
is because well, what's the context of the nations in Genesis 1 through 11?
What's the context of the world?
And the answer is Genesis 10.
The table of nations, we have 70 nations there, they're all Eastern Mediterranean,
from the south, like in Africa all the way up, to what we would call the Caucasus now.
And so some people will argue that is the context for the flood, that is the landmass
that was affected by the flood, that is a region, it is not an entire globe.
And so this view says, it makes sense then, since the people who lived in Canaan,
from whence these giant clans came, where they lived?
They lived in these places described in Genesis 10; the Amorites,
the Hittites, from Anatolia, the Hurrians, also from Anatolia.
Again, you have Mesopotamia, you have the Aegean, the Sea Peoples,
they're all in this region.
And so their idea is, again, if you take option number two is like,
Look, there was a flood here, and we've got the Nephilim issue.
I mean, the Greeks know about this with the Titans story, the Hittites write about this,
the Mesopotamians write about this with the Apkallu.
They all know about that there was a great flood.
And this flood was a regional local event.
And not every person and not every one of these guys was killed.
You had some survive, and they become the progenitors of the Nephilim later
that we get during the days of Moses and Joshua.
You say, Well, that can't be because the flood story in the Bible says
that all flesh was killed.
Right, all flesh in that region.
Maybe they took to their boats because their seafaring peoples,
like the Philistines, the Aegean, you know, the whole list that we talked about last time,
there were like 10 or 15 people groups that trace their lineage back to the Aegean,
the Amorites live on the coast.
Okay, remember Canaan fathered Tyro, Sidon and all that.
Maybe they just took the boats and they survived.
Maybe all the flesh is... everybody who died was from this region.
I mean, this is the way that they would argue this view.
And they don't argue it trying to please scientists or geologists or anything like this.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to create a circumstance
where it makes sense that some of these people groups
that are later associated with the giants in Canaan,
could have had ancestors that survived a local regional event,
and that becomes the answer to how do we get naphthalene after the flood.