CHAPTER X

SPECIAL QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE

In studying the literature relating to the Deluge, we are constantly met by questions as to its so-called 'universality.' Was it a local or universal Deluge and if universal in what sense so? This is a point in which neglect or ignorance of the necessary physical conditions has led to the strangest misconceptions.

It is obvious that there are four senses in which a catastrophe like the Deluge of Noah may be affirmed or denied to have been universal.

1. It may have been universal in the sense of being a deep stratum of water covering the whole globe, both land and sea. Such universality could not have been in the mind of the writer, and probably has been claimed knowingly by no writer in modern times. Halley in the last century understood the conditions of such universality, though he seems to have supposed that the impact of a comet might supply the necessary water. Owen has directed attention to the fact that such a deluge might be as fatal to the inhabitants of the waters as to those of the land. In any case, such universality would demand an enormous supply of water from some extra-terrestrial source.

2. The Deluge may have been universal in the sense of being a submersion of the whole of the land, either by subsidence or by elevation of the ocean bed. Such a state of things may have existed in primitive geological ages before our continents were elevated, but we have no scientific evidence of its recurrence at any later time, though large portions of the continents have been again and again submerged. The writers of Genesis i. and of Psalm civ. seem to have known of no such total submergence since the elevation of the first dry land, and nothing of this kind is expressed or certainly implied in the Deluge story.

3. The Deluge may have been universal in so far as man, its chief object, and certain animals useful or necessary to him, are concerned. This kind of universality would seem to have been before the mind of the writer when he says that 'Noah only, and they who were with him in the ark, remained alive.'[55]

[55] Genesis vii. 23.

4. The Deluge may have been universal in so far as the area and observation and information of the narrator extended. The story is evidently told in the form of a narrative derived from eye-witnesses, and this form seems even to have been chosen or retained purposely to avoid any question of universality of the first and second kinds referred to above. The same form of narrative is preserved in the Chaldean legend. This fact is not affected by the doctrine held by some of the schools of disintegrators, that the narrative is divisible into two documents, respectively 'Jahvistic' and 'Elohistic.' I have elsewhere[56] shown that there is a very different reason for the use of these two names of God. But if there were two original witnesses whose statements were put together by an editor, this surely does not invalidate their testimony or deprive them of the right to have it understood as they intended.

[56] _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, chap. iv.

It is thus evident that the whole question of 'universality' is little more than a mere useless logomachy, having no direct relation to the facts or to the credibility of the narrative.

There are also in connection with this question of universality certain scientific and historical facts already referred to which we may again summarise here, and which are essential to the understanding of the question. Nothing is more certainly known in geology than that at the close of the later tertiary or pleistocene age the continents of the northern hemisphere stood higher and spread their borders more widely than at present. In this period also they were tenanted by a very grand and varied mammalian fauna, and it is in this continental age of the later pleistocene or early modern time that we find the first unequivocal evidence of man as existing on various parts of the continents. At the close of this period occurred changes, whether sudden or gradual we do not know, though they could not have occupied a very long time, which led to the extinction of the earliest races of men and many contemporaneous animals. That these changes were in part, at least, of the nature of submergence we learn from the fact that our present continents are more sunken or less elevated out of the water, and also from the deposit of superficial gravels and other _detritus_ more recent than the pleistocene over their surfaces. We are thus shut up by geological facts to the belief in a Deluge geologically modern and practically universal.

One other objection to the Deluge narrative perhaps deserves a word of comment--that urged against the statement of the gradual disappearance of the waters. The extraordinary difficulty is raised respecting this, that the water must have rushed seaward in a furious torrent. The objection is based apparently on the idea that the foundation for the original narrative was a river inundation in the Mesopotamian plain. This cannot be admitted; but if it were, the objection would not apply. River inundations, whether of the Nile or Euphrates, subside inch by inch, not after the manner of mountain torrents. Thus this objection is another instance of difficulties gratuitously imported into the history.

In point of fact the narrator represents the Deluge as prevailing for a whole year, which would be impossible in the case of a river inundation. He attributes it in part, at least, to the 'great deep'--that is, the ocean; and he represents the ark as drifting inland or toward the north. Such conditions can be satisfied only by the supposition of a subsidence of the land similar in kind, at least, to the great post-glacial flood of geology. Partial subsidences of this kind, local but very extreme, have occurred even in later times, as, for instance, in the Runn of Cutch, the delta of the Mississippi, and the delta of the Nile; and if the objectors are determined to make the Deluge of Noah very local and more recent than the post-glacial flood, it would be more rational to refer to subsidences like those just mentioned, and of which they will find examples in Lyell's _Principles_ and other geological books. It is, however, decidedly more probable that Noah's Flood is identical with that which destroyed the men of the mammoth age, the palæocosmic or 'palæolithic' men;[57] and in that case the recession of the waters would probably be gradual, but intermittent, 'going and returning,' as our ancient narrator has it; but there need not have been any violent _débâcle_.

[57] _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, chaps. iii. and iv.

It is also to be noted that a submergence of the land and consequent deluge may be cataclysmic or tranquil, according to local circumstances, and that it may have been locally sudden, while for the whole world it was gradual and of longer duration. Such differences must belong to all great submergences, which may in one place produce great disturbance and very coarse deposits, in another may be quiet and deposit the finest silt. Even the flood of a river or the action of a tide admits of variations of this kind. In narrow channels the great tides of the Bay of Fundy rush as torrents; in wide bays they creep in imperceptibly.

The traditions and Biblical history of the Deluge not only furnish important material for connecting the geological ages with the period of human history, and for enabling us to realise the fact that early man was a witness of some of the later physical and vital vicissitudes that have passed over the earth, but may be correlated with other ancient traditions which seem at first sight to have no immediate relation to it.

As an example, I may refer to the well-known Egyptian fable of Atlantis, which may be a reminiscence of early man in the second continental period, and which we may, perhaps, even connect with the Mexican tradition of civilisation reaching America from the East.[58]

[58] It is, perhaps, only an accident that _Atl_ is the Mexican word for water.

Plato has handed down to us a circumstantial tradition, derived from Egypt, of a great Atlantic continent west of Europe, once thickly peopled, and the seat of an empire that was dominant over the Mediterranean regions. This continent, or island, was called Atlantis, and it had been submerged with all its people in prehistoric times. This tradition may have reference to certain geological facts of the early modern period already referred to. If the Egyptian tradition really extended back to the antediluvian period, we can readily understand their belief in the continent of Atlantis. We have already ascertained the great extension in that period of the land of Western Europe, and there may have been outlying insular tracts in the Atlantic now quite unknown to us. These lands may well have sustained nations of the gigantic Cro-magnon race, 'men of renown,' who, when their westward progress was stayed by the ocean, and they were checked in the north by the increasing cold, may have turned their arms against the dwellers on the Mediterranean coasts, perhaps in the age immediately preceding the Deluge. We know little as yet of the history of those Horshesu, or children of Horus, who are said to have preceded the historic period in Egypt. There must have been Egyptian literature about these people, and should this be recovered we shall probably learn more of Atlantis. In the meantime we may, at least, bring the tradition of that perished continent into harmony with geology and history. I may add that we need not consider the above view as at variance with that of those archæologists who, like the late Sir D. Wilson,[59] suppose the tradition of Atlantis to have been founded on vague intimations of the existence of America, since any such intimations which reached the civilised nations of Southern Europe or Africa would naturally be considered as an indication that some part of the lost Atlantis still continued to exist.

[59] _The Lost Atlantis_, 1892.

In still another direction does the deluge story connect itself with physical probabilities. If we examine the Atlantic map representing the soundings of the Challenger expedition, we shall find evidence not only of that extension of land in temperate Western Europe which may have originated the story of Atlantis, but other dispositions of land, especially in the extreme north and south, which may have influenced antediluvian climate. We have reason to believe that in the second continental period, that of palæocosmic man, Baffin's Bay may have been greatly narrowed and Behring's Straits entirely closed, while large tracts of land existed around Iceland and west of Norway. There would thus be almost continuous land connection around the north pole, permitting easy extension of man and of hardy animals. There would also be much less access of ice to the North Atlantic.

At the same time in another region there was probably a land connection from Florida to South America by the Bahamas, and the equatorial current may have been more powerfully deflected northward than now. The effect would be to produce around the North Atlantic, and especially on the eastern side, a golden age of genial climate, fitted to early man, but destined as time went on and geographical changes proceeded, preparatory to the great diluvial subsidence, to fade away into the cool and damp climate of the later post-glacial or antediluvian period. This again would lead to migrations, wars, and fierce struggles for existence among the human populations--a time of anarchy and violence preceding the final catastrophe.

Much collateral evidence in substantiation of these probabilities can be collected from the distribution of marine life[60] and the changes of level, even on the American coast. They conjure up before us strange visions of the prehistoric past, and of the vicissitudes of which man himself has been witness, and of which, whether through memory and tradition or the revelation of God, he has continued to retain some written records which, long dim and uncertain, are now beginning to be put into relation with physical facts ascertained by modern scientific observation.

[60] See _The Ice Age in Canada_, by the author. Montreal: 1893.

We have already seen how the Deluge story and the fate of the antediluvians have interwoven themselves with the myths and superstitions of the Old World. The six great gods of the Egyptian pantheon represent the creative days, and the 'Sons of Horus' the antediluvians. So we have the ten patriarchs or kings of the old Chaldeans corresponding to those of Genesis, and the heaven-defying Titans of the old mythologies representing the giants before the Flood. Perhaps, however, no illustration of this is more patent or more touching than that well-known one of Ishtar, the Astarte of the Syrians, the Artemis of the Greeks, and who has been identified with the chief female divinity of many other ancient nations, even with that Diana whom 'all Asia and the inhabited world worshippeth.'

The Chaldean deluge tablets for the first time introduce her to us as an antediluvian goddess, and inform us that she is the deified mother of men, the same with the Biblical Isha, or Eve. In the crisis of the Deluge we are told, 'Ishtar spoke like a little child, the great goddess pronounced her discourse. Behold how mankind has returned to clay. I am _the mother who brought forth men_, and like the fishes they fill the sea. The gods because of the angels of the abyss are weeping with me.' Ishtar is thus the mother of men, herself deified and gone into the heavens, but even there mourning over her hapless children. She may be a star-goddess, or the moon may be her emblem; but for all that she appears in this old legend as a deified human mother, with a mother's heart yearning over the progeny that had sprung from her womb, and had been nourished in her breast. It was this, more than her crescent or starry diadem, that commended her worship to her children. Her representative in Genesis, the first mother, Isha, or Eve, is no goddess, but a woman. Yet is she the emblem of life and the mother of a promised Redeemer of humanity, who is to undo the results of sin and to restore the Paradise of God bruising the head of the great serpent who, in the Chaldean as in the Hebrew story, represents the power of evil. Ishtar has been represented as the bride of the god Tammuz, the Adonis[61] of the Greeks, and whose worship was one of the idolatries that led the women of Israel astray, 'weeping for Tammuz';[62] but it now appears that, according to the oldest doctrine, she is his mother,[63] and he was a 'keeper of sheep,' dwelling in Eden, or Idinu, and murdered by his brother Adar, who is also a god, and more especially the god of war. In short, the story of Ishtar, Tammuz, and Adar, the parent of so many myths, is merely the familiar one of Cain and Abel. Hence the belief that the murder of Tammuz was connected with the Deluge, and hence the annual lamentation of the women for Tammuz when the spring inundations swelled and reddened the waters of the streams--a rite possibly even antediluvian, and commemorative of the mourning of the first mother for her slain son, to rescue whom it was fabled that she even descended into Hades.

[61] From the Semitic title 'Adonai,' my Lord.

[62] Ezekiel viii. 14.

[63] Sayce, _Hibbert Lectures_.

Oppert regards the legend of Tammuz and Ishtar as a solar myth, and supposes that the story of Cain and Abel was based on it. But a family history of crime and sorrow is a much more real and probable thing as a basis for tradition than a solar myth, and naturalists at least will be disposed to invert the theory, and to believe that the simple Bible story was the foundation of all the varied cults and superstitions that clustered round Ishtar and Tammuz, as well as personages like Osiris and Isis, who seem to have been later avatars, or revivals of the same tale.

It would be easy to show that the deluge story has intimate connections with other ancient myths and superstitions, as well as with the results of modern archæology and geology. But were this all, our inquiry, however interesting and curious, would have little practical value. It has two important bearings on the present time. Christianity bases itself, its founder Himself being witness, on the early chapters of Genesis, as history and prophecy, and the treatment which these ancient and inspired records have met with in modern times at the hands of destructive criticism is doing its worst in aid of the anti-*Christian tendencies of our time. To remove the doubts that have been cast on these old records is therefore a clear gain to the highest interests of humanity, and if theology and philology are unable to secure this benefit, natural science may well step forward to lend its aid. Another connection with present interests depends on the fact that, while superstitions akin to that which deified the mother of the promised seed, and introduced the world-wide cults of Astarte and Aphrodite, still reign over great masses of men, absolute materialism and desperate struggle for existence among men and nations are growing and extending themselves as never before since the antediluvian times, and are provoking a like signal and direful vengeance. In the midst of all this, Christians look forward to the second coming of Jesus Christ to destroy the powers of evil and to inaugurate a better time; and it was He who said, 'As it came to pass in the days of Noah, even so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.' Let us remember the old story of the flood of Noah lest those days come on us unawares.