Was Noah's Flood a Myth?

One of the great mysteries of the Bible. The flood of Noah.
Did it really happen or was it just a fable.?

 The flood is not accepted as historical fact by many historians and scientists because of the many "accepted" claims of the book of Genesis that have been interpreted as 'fact' over the centuries. Perhaps the reason it is not accepted is not because of what the Bible says, but how it has been interpreted and presented by theologians over the centuries. Some of the accepted "facts" are:

1. It was a global flood that covered the whole earth.
2. It destroyed and killed all mankind except Noah and his family.
3. The ark carried two of every animal species on the earth.
4. It covered all the mountains of the world, including Mt.
   Everest and the Himalayans.
5. It was caused by constant rain for 40 days and nights.
6. The flood waters just "disappeared after a while and everything settled back to normal.

With those interpretations it is not surprising that this story is rejected by most of the scientific community. Are these "facts" or just interpretations, or perhaps "mis-interpretations"?

 Lets address each of the arguments above and come to some enlightened conclusions based on what we now know to be true.

1. The idea that the whole world was flooded began with the first scribes who translated the Torah of Moses and an error was made at that time. "The World" to those ancient scribes was not the same world that we think of as 'Planet Earth'. It was all of the "known" world to them. They were only mindful of the areas surrounding the Mediterranean. If you had asked one of them if Australia was flooded, they would have responded, "What"? Also, they had a choice of three ways to translate the Hebrew word "erets" the word used in the original text to describe the extent of the flood. Land, country, or world. The same word was translated as "land" in many later passages of the Bible. They chose "world" because the previous passages said all that God had created was destroyed, thinking that meant everything on earth. Many theologians now accept that the book of Genesis describes two different "creations", the original creation of "Heaven and Earth" in chapter one, and a later creation 6000 years ago of an area and garden called "Eden", in chapter two. If God was only referring to His most recent creation, in the Garden of Eden, then the flood would have included only that area. If I say that I sold my car, you know that I am not talking about the 1962 corvette that I once had and most dearly would like to have back now, but the latest one that I drive.
2. "All Mankind" includes everyone that is a descendant of Adam. Our science books now teach that at the time described for Noah's flood, the earth had probably 10 million inhabitants of "Homo sapiens" on it. Where is the conflict? According to the Bible, those 'inhabitants' are not "man" because they didn't descend from Adam. They were simply another species that looked like man and had somewhat similar qualities. They lacked the longevity, disease immunity, high intelligence, and were much inferior to the man of the Bible, Adam. That said, "all mankind" except for Noah and his family, was destroyed by the flood, a true statement.
3. If "all the animals created" includes only the ones created in the "Garden" creation event, then the ark surely could have held all of the animals. The number would have been in the hundreds at most, instead of the millions usually portrayed and advocated by some theologians, and ridiculed by most scientists.
4. The flood probably did cover the mountains and hills of the area recognized in Genesis as "the world" because there are no major mountain chains in the area accepted as the likely area of Eden.
5. This last argument is the hardest to explain because we don't really know what caused the event described as Noah's flood.

I'll try to present some ideas that may offer an explanation that would satisfy both reason and religion.

There were two events that took place 7000-8000 years ago in this region that could hold the explanation for what caused the flood.

I wrote a book 3 years ago that presented the hypothesis that a giant tsunami could have fit the Genesis description of the flood. It would have "covered" the mountains by coming over them into the valleys. It would have come so suddenly that there would have been no time to run or seek shelter. The force of the water coming from the west would have carried Noah eastward to the highest mountain in its path. Mt Ararat.

But what caused it?

In my book I presented the idea that maybe a comet or meteor strike in the Atlantic or Mediterranean could have produce such a tsunami. This is supported in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", a Sumerian fable, a description of the events that are more detailed than those of Genesis.

Recently, it has been discovered that around that time an unusual event happened in the Mediterranean that could be the trigger for the event. Around 8000 years ago, Mt, Aetna, Europe's most active volcano, erupted and caused possibly the largest landslide in human history. Half of the huge volcanic cone slipped, almost instantly, into the waters of the Mediterranean, creating a tsunami hundreds of feet high, that struck every coastline in the whole Mediterranean area, and traveled far inland. This alone would not have been enough to create a flood that justified the Genesis description, but, the same tsunami could have caused another event.

In William Ryan and Walter Pittman's book Noah's Flood, they hypothesis that the entire Black Sea basin, an area that lies 600 feet below the Mediterranean, was flooded about 7000-9000 years ago when the narrow neck of land separating the two, broke through, and the full force of the seas beyond suddenly inundated that basin and destroyed any civilizations that were there. What caused the neck of land at the Bosporus Strait to break through? It could have been from the force of the tsunami that came from Mt. Aetna, striking it.

The two events could have coincided and resulted in the greatest global catastrophe in human history.

To answer item #6 above, where did the waters go to after the flood? If the flood was a combination of the two events described above, then the result would be that the Black Sea remained as a permanent feature of the landscape, and wherever the tsunami hit elsewhere, was drained as the waters dissipated back into the natural channels to the sea.

This is only a hypothesis, but it demonstrates that reasonable explanations of how God performed such miracles can be presented if we are willing to look at all the knowledge we have obtained and apply some imagination. The result is a version more believable by both bible scholars and historians.

The true miracle was the message of God to Noah of his willingness to save a remnant of humanity, foretelling of the event, and telling him to prepare for it well ahead of the time.