Noah's Flood

The event

God gave Noah remarkably specific instructions: build an ark of gopher wood, seal it with pitch, three stories tall, with a single door and a window — dimensions large enough to carry Noah's family and pairs of every kind of land animal and bird (sevens, in the case of clean animals). For decades, tradition holds, Noah built in plain view of a world that mocked him, while the apostle Peter would later call him "a herald of righteousness" for the patience of his witness (2 Peter 2:5).

When the day came, Noah, his wife, his three sons — Shem, Ham, and Japheth — and their wives entered the ark, and God Himself shut the door behind them. Then "the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened," and rain fell for forty days and nights while the waters prevailed over the whole earth for a hundred and fifty days, covering even the highest mountains and blotting out every other living, breathing thing on dry land.

God did not forget Noah in the ark. The waters receded, and the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat; Noah sent out a raven, then a dove — twice — until the dove finally returned no more, a sign the earth was dry. Noah, his family, and every creature walked out onto a washed, silent, waiting world, and Noah's first act was to build an altar and offer sacrifices to the Lord who had preserved them.

Christians have long affirmed the Flood as a real, catastrophic, historical judgment — Jesus Himself compared "the days of Noah" to the suddenness of His own return (Matthew 24:37-39), and Peter treats Noah's flood and the final judgment by fire as parallel historical realities (2 Peter 3:5-7). Faithful evangelicals do debate its precise date and extent, but young-earth and old-earth believers alike share the same core conviction: God really judged a real, wicked world, and really saved Noah's family through it.

Dating

2348 BC is Ussher's traditional figure, derived from the Hebrew (Masoretic) text's genealogies and Noah's stated age (600) at the Flood's onset, with the family leaving the ark about a year later. Young-earth evangelicals generally affirm a Flood in roughly this era, though a notable group of young-earth researchers argues the Septuagint preserves the original genealogy numbers, which would place the Flood around 3300 BC — in part because ancient Near Eastern archaeology attests continuous civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia through the mid-2300s BC. Old-earth evangelicals who see gaps in the genealogies would place it earlier still. Evangelicals also differ on the Flood's geographic extent — whether it covered the entire globe or the whole of the then-known inhabited world — a secondary debate; both views affirm the Flood as a real, historical, judicial act of God.

Scripture references

• Genesis 6:9-8:22
• Matthew 24:37-39
• 2 Peter 2:5
• 2 Peter 3:5-7