Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
The flood and its extent
The whole earth, all flesh, every high mountain. Global, or the whole known world?
Genesis 7:17-24, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: was Noah's flood worldwide, or did it cover the world Noah's readers knew? It rained everywhere this weekend. From the state weather desk, that means the state. Said of the planet, it means the planet. Everywhere and all take their range from the speaker's frame, and the question is whose frame the flood narrative uses.
The flood narrative uses universal-sounding phrases again and again. Whether they mean the planet or the known world is the question, and it bears on how the Nephilim reappear after the flood in Numbers 13:33.
The phrase "the whole earth," kol erets, appears in passages that are plainly local (Heiser lists Genesis 13:9 and 41:57 among others, where the frame is a region). "All humankind," kol adam, also appears where it cannot mean every person on the planet. Genesis 10 lists the nations descended from Noah's sons, and all of them sit in the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean and the Aegean.
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
Lennox does not take up the extent of the flood in Seven Days. His concern is creation and the days. He treats Genesis 1 to 11 as describing actual events, including the flood through which Noah and his family were preserved.
In the IVP Bible Background Commentary, Walton and his co-authors set out the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh flood accounts and say there is no reason to doubt that they and Genesis refer to the same flood. The similarities come from a shared event, the differences from each culture viewing it through its own theology. The commentary reads "windows of heaven" as observer's language, not scientific description.
Heiser sets out the textual case for a regional flood: kol erets and kol adam in local contexts, the Table of Nations confined to the known world, and Psalm 104:9, which he reads as God promising never to cover the earth with water as at creation. He offers it as one of two ways to explain giants after the flood. The MacArthur Study Bible argues the opposite: "under the whole heaven" and waters above the highest mountains prove a global flood, and more than 270 flood stories worldwide trace to it.
The regional reading has to account for the repeated universal language and for 7:19-20. The global reading has to explain the local use of the same phrases elsewhere and the Nephilim of Numbers 13:33, who appear after a flood that, on that reading, left no one but Noah's family. Two supports on either side are weaker than they look. Psalm 104:9 does not mention the flood; reading it as ruling one out is Heiser's inference from its creation setting. The MacArthur note's figure of more than 270 flood stories worldwide is given without a source.
Not the same as denying the flood happened. Every source here treats it as a real event.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/divine-council-index\/numbers-13-33\/","n":"Numbers 13:33","s":"The spies report the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, and call themselves grasshoppers.","r":"Numbers 13:33"}
- Heiser, Reversing Hermon (2017), ch. 1, Nephilim after the Flood, and nn. 38-39
- Walton, Matthews and Chavalas, IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (2000), on Genesis 7:11-8:12 and Ancient Near Eastern Flood Accounts
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), notes on Genesis 7:19-20
