Part II: Flood Traditions of the World\
MY PURPOSE in this chapter is not to write a cursive discourse, but to take the above main points and give some indication regarding the way in which specific illustrations are to be found in traditions from different areas.
1. Moral cause.
In one of the Indian traditions, the seventh king of the Hindus is Satyavrata, a man who reigned in Dravira, a "country washed by the waves of the sea." During his reign, an evil demon named Hayagriva furtively appropriated to himself the Holy Books (i.e., the Vedas) which the first Manu had received from Brahman; the consequence was that the whole human race sank into a fearful degeneracy with the exception of seven "saints" and the virtuous king himself.
The story tells how the divine spirit Vishnu appeared to him in the shape of a fish and said, "In seven days all the creatures which have offended against me shall be destroyed by a deluge. Thou alone shalt be saved in a capacious vessel..." After seven days, incessant torrents of rain descended and ocean waves climbed beyond their wonted shores.
The idea essential to the moral cause in this story is that in the absence of the "Word of God" the human race sank into fearful degeneracy. Kalisch, who gives these details, says that the descendants of the first man of the new race, Manu, were collectively referred to as Manudsha (i.e., "born of Manu"), a form which he equates with Mensch. (35) I think it is worth noting that Manu is said to have had three sons, their names being given as Sharma, C'harma, and Jyapeti: rather clearly being corruptions of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. (36) According to Urquhart, Manu was the Indian "Noah's" name, where Satyavrata was a title, the component Satya meaning "the righteous one."
In the Greek story, Noah is called Deukalion. (37) In this account, according to Apollodorus, Zeus was provoked into sending the deluge either because of the "enormous iniquity with which the earth was contaminated by the then existing brazen race of men" or due to the existence of "the fifty monstrous sons of Sykoron."
I think it is safe to say that the nearer a people is geographically to the site of the landing of the ark, the more truly do they speak of the cause of the Flood as being man's moral corruption. As one gets further away into more distant parts of the world, the cause of the Flood becomes less and less a question of morals but more and more a question of bad behavior--i.e., social misconduct, like the fisherman whose hook caught in the hair of the god--or simply arbitrary annoyance on the part of the gods with behavior which the condemned were not even aware was improper. It is curious that in many of the accounts the cause is partly attributed to the misconduct of giants, which seems to be a recollection of Genesis 6:4.
2. One man warned.
This does not need specific illustration. Either a god or an animal simply gives one man advanced notice. On this they all agree.
3. The survivors as progenitors of the present world population.
There are no exceptions among the 150 or so traditions currently known. The Flood is always considered to have wiped out all mankind except those specially warned. Where only one man survived, as we have seen, special steps were taken to generate a new race.
In the Greek story, Deukalion and his wife Pyrrha repeopled the earth, not by natural procreation, but by casting stones behind them as instructed by Zeus, these stones then becoming people. This feature of the story is generally taken to have originated as a consequence of the similarity between the Greek word for "stone" and for "people." It is as though the original story said that peoples sprang up behind them, whereas in time it began to be reported that pebbles sprang up behind them. Someone later on tried to reconcile the two stories by saying that pebbles became people.
Lenormant reports that the Tamanakis, a Carib tribe on the banks of the Orinoco, are credited with a Flood legend which says that a man and a woman alone escaped by climbing to the summit of Mount Tapanacu. (38) There they are said to have thrown behind them, over their heads, some coconuts from which issued a new race of men. The parallelism is curious. It is not found in any other stories to my knowledge. Perhaps it is a case of borrowing.
4. The part played by animals.
As we have seen, a fish warned Manu in the Indian story and an eagle gave warning in the Ancasmarca story. (39) In another Peruvian story, it is a llama that gives the warning. (40) The Cherokees say the warning was given by a dog. (41)
Soviet seismologists have undertaken a program of research to improve present earthquake prediction methods by studying the natural warning systems that many animals appear to possess. (42) It is interesting to note that fish in particular are believed to have a mechanism ten times more sensitive to seismic changes than the best man-made equipment. Dr. Protasov, head of the Hydrobionics Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Morphology and Animal Ecology, in collaboration with the Geophysical Institute, has already improved seismic receivers on the basis of fish studies. But other animals may prove equally informative. For example, in Tashkent there was a mass migration of ants carrying their eggs about an hour before the first tremors of the 1966 earthquake. The Soviet scientists are hoping to discover the actual mechanism by which animals are able to forecast natural disasters.
After the Flood had destroyed mankind and "Noah" alone was left, he attempted to find out the state of things by determining the depth of water. Various animals were called into service. The Crees of Manitoba say that several waterfowl were sent to dive to the bottom but they all drowned. Then a muskrat, having been dispatched on the same errand, succeeded in bringing up a mouthful of mud. (43) The Ojibway seem to have the same idea except that they specified a loon made the first attempt. "Noah," given the name Menaboshu, is reported to have said to the loon which was swimming on the water, "Brother loon, do me a favor, and dive down deep and see if you can find the earth, without which I cannot live." The loon was not successful. Later on, Menaboshu found a muskrat stiff with cold and almost dead. This he fished out of the water, warmed with his breath, and brought back to life. He then said, "Little brother rat, neither of us can live without the earth. Dive into the water and, if you can find it, bring me some earth. If it is only three grains of sand I shall be able to make something out of them." The obliging animal dived immediately and after a long time reappeared. But it was dead and floated on the water. Menaboshu took it up and discovered in one of its little paws a couple of grains of sand. He blew these into the water and each became at first a little island which afterward united and grew into land.
It seems to me difficult to suppose that such details so graphically telling the great depth of the Flood could possibly have been borrowed from a missionary's account of the biblical story. I do not know of one native tradition which reflects the matter-of-fact way in which the depth of water is indicated in Scripture. These accounts remember the event but enjoy none of the factual sobriety which is to be found in Noah's logbook account.
5. The "ark" grounds locally.
With the exception of the biblical account, this is virtually universal. The Andaman Islanders say that Noah landed near a place called Wotaemi; (44) the people of Sumatra say the ark landed on Mount Marapi; (45) the Fijians on Mount Mbenga; (46) the Greeks either on Mount Parnassus or Mount Othrys; (47) the Tamanakis (a Carib tribe on the banks of the Orinoco) on Mount Tapanacu; (48) the Mexicans on Mount Colhuacan; (49) the Yuin (Australian aborigines) on Mount Dromedary; (50) the northern Maidu (southwestern United States) on Keddie Peak in the Sacramento Valley; (51) and so it goes.
6. Eight souls were saved.
There is considerable doubt whether the recurrence of the number eight has much significance, with the possible exception of the story of Manu and the seven "saints." According to both Paterson (52) and Cook, (53) the Chinese so-called Flood story speaks of eight souls surviving. The Druids also mention eight survivors, though their "Flood" story bears the least resemblance to the biblical account of all the stories I have come across. (54) The Fijian story implies more than eight survivors, since it speaks of two canoes passing by just at the right time and picking up the only eight people still alive in the water. (55) But presumably someone was paddling each of the canoes, one of the pilots being the "god of carpenters." This might be a memorial of the fact that Noah must have been no mean carpenter himself. There is also a Peruvian account, supposed to have been related to the first Spanish settlers, in which seven persons are mentioned. (56) It seems to me a little unlikely that the exact number of survivors would be recalled so accurately. However, it is not impossible, and Urquhart mentions a story also from Malay in which there were eight survivors, a story which he thinks has not been borrowed.
7. Graphic detail.
I think it inevitable that any good storyteller who has witnessed any great flood would be apt to embellish the account in the telling of it. Such details as those mentioned in chapter 1 are, after all, what one would really expect in a catastrophe of these proportions. They are not unique aspects of the event and therefore probably have no particular significance.
8. The question of borrowing.
The really crucial point here is not whether native tradition borrowed (via missionaries) from the biblical account, but rather whether the biblical record is itself only a copy of one of the Cuneiform accounts. As noted in chapter 1, there are good reasons for giving the biblical account priority because of the very simplicity of it. It is a well-established fact that oft-repeated stories always grow in length, each recorder adding something of his own invention. The Cuneiform accounts are consistently much more elaborate than the terms of the biblical account. Brown, Driver, and Briggs note that the word for ark signifies "a chest" rather than a vessel. Moreover, there is no mention of a launching, nor of "sea," nor of navigation, nor of a pilot. In the Cuneiform accounts everything seems to indicate a maritime people, a people dwelling on the shores of the Persian Gulf--not a highland people living in Armenia.
9. The element of fantasy.
As in all other traditions of antiquity, the element of fantasy is so common to Flood stories that were it not for the four basic elements which are almost universally to be found incorporated in them, the great majority of them would immediately be dismissed as local creations without any basis in historical fact. It is part of their charm that the utterly impossible is treated as though it were quite in accord with common experience. Animals speak, mountains rise with the water, the gods are as frightened as people, miracles abound, and the world is repeopled by entirely supernatural methods.
Against this world-wide background of confused record, the account in Genesis stands in marked contrast as a sane, sensible, and entirely credible event, the only exceptional aspect being the uncertainty as to the meaning of its hyperbole.
Some Collections of Flood Stories
The following list of sources provides a means whereby the reader particularly interested in some area of the world can find what stories are known among the people in that locality.
The most readily accessible, and probably the most complete listing, will be found in Sir James G. Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament (Macmillan, London, 1919), vol. 1, pp. 146-330. The following tabulation shows the range of these accounts.
HELLENIC 146
Apollodorus 147
Pindar Hellenieus 147
Megarius story 148
Aristotle 148
Plato 149
Ovid 149
Athenian legend 151
Phyrgian legend 155Apamea 156
Dardanus 163
Samothracian 168EUROPEAN 174
Icelandic 175
Welsh 175
Lithuanian 176
Transylvania Gypsies 177
Vogul story 178
Savoy story 179PERSIAN 180
INDIAN 183
Satapatha Brahmana 183
Manu 183
Sanskrit: Puranas 187
Matsyu Purana 188
Bhagavata Purana 190
Agni Purana 192
Bilo (C. India) 193
Kamars (C. India) 195
Hos (Bengal) 195
Mundas (Bengal) 196
Santah (Bengal) 196
Lepcha and Tibetan 198
Singphos, Lushais, Assam 198
Anals, Assam 198
Ahoms, Assam 199
Cashmere (or Kashmir) 204
Karems (Burma) 208
Singphos (Burma) (or Chingpaws) 208
Bahnars (Cochin China) 209
Bannavs (Cochin China) 210
Benna Jakim ( Malay) 211
Kelantan (Malay) 211
Lolos (S. China) 212
Yao story (Yellow River flooding) 214PACIFIC 217
Bataks (Sumatra) 217
Natives of Nias (Sumatra) 219
Natives of Engano (Sumatra) 219
Dyaks of Borneo 220
Ot-Danoms (Dutch Borneo) 222
Alfoors of Ceram 223
Natives of Roth (Timor) 223
Natives of East India Island 224
Natives of Flores Island 224
Philippine Islanders 225
Wild tribe of Formosa 225
Ami (Formosa), 3 stories 226
Bunun (Formosa) 232
Andaman Islanders 233
Kurnai, Victoria, Australia 234
Lake Tyers, Victoria, Australia 237
Natives of Queensland 237
Natives of New Guinea 237
Natives of Mamberano (Dutch New Guinea) 237
Fijians 239
Natives of Melanesia 240
Of Polynesia and Micronesia 241
Tahitian 242
Leeward Islands (Tahiti) 243
Hawaiian 245
Hervey Islands (Mangaia) 246
Samoan 249
Nanumangan (Hudson's island) 249
South Pacific 252
Maori 252
Pelew Islanders 253THE AMERICAS 253
Indians of Brazil 253
Cape Frio Indians 254
Coroados (S. Brazil) 257
Caragas (S. Brazil) 260
Ipurina Tribe (Upper Amazon) 260
River Purus Indians 261
Ivaros (Ecuador) 262
Muratos (Ecuador) 263
Araucas (Chile) 265
Ackwois (British Guiana) 265
Arawaks (British Guiana) 266
Macusis (British Guiana) 267
Orinoco Indians 268
Chibohas (Bogota) 269
Cararis (Ecuador) 271
Peruvian Indians 272
Incas 273
Chiriguanos of Bolivia 273
Terra del Fuegians 274
Panama and Nicaragua 275
Mexican (Codex Chimalpopoea) 276
Michoacau 277
Popol Nuh story 279
Huichol Indians (Mexico) 281
Cora Indians (Mexico) 281
Tarahumares (Mexico) 281
Caribs (Antilles) 282
Papagos (Arizona) 287
Pimas (Arizona) 288
Zuni (New Mexieo) 289
Luiseno (California) 290
South River Indians (California) 290
Ashochimi Indians (California) 291
Maidu Indians (California) 292
Natchez (Lower Mississippi) 294
Mandan Indians 295
Cherokee 295
Delaware Indians 297
Maitaquais (Canada) 301
Chippewa 308
Ojibway (Ontario) 308
Blackfeet Indians 309
Ottawa Indians 310
Cree Indians 309
Dogrib and Slave Indians 310
Hareskin Indians 310
Tinneh Indians (many stories) 312
Tlingit (NW Coast) 316
Haida (NW Canada) 319
Tsimshian (NW Canada) 319
Bella Coola (Canada) 320
Kwakintl (NW Canada) 320
Lilluet (NW Canada) 321
Thompson (NW Canada) 322
Kootenay (NW Canada) 323
Indians of Washington State 323
Cascade Mountain Indians 324
Nez Perces and Cayuses Indians 325
Kathlamet Indians (Lower Columbia River) 325
Alaska Eskimos 326
Tchiglit Eskimos 327
Central Eskimos 327
Greenlanders 328
Africa 329
Congo area 329
Basuto tribes (borrowed) 329
Masai (borrowed) 330
A list of some eighty-eight Flood stories will be found in Richard Andree, Die Flutsagen Ethnographisch Hetrachtet, published in 1891. Of these, the author considers that sixty-two or more show no evidence of borrowing. His list includes the Greek traditions according to Strabo, Pausanias, Apollodorus, Pindar, and Ovid. Stories are also included from Locris, Agros, Cicily, Delphi, Megara, Thessaly, Dodona, Cos, Rhodes, Crete, Samothrace, and Arcadia. Stories are also given from among the Goths and other Indo-Germanic peoples, from Lithuania, from Hungary, from the Ural Mountains, from Central Asia (Mongol tribes), from Turkestan, Afghanistan, Bokhara, East India, Kashmir, Tibet, Burma, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, Kamchatka, from North and South America in general, from Mexico, from Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Haiti, British Guiana, Brazil, Borneo, the Sandwich Islands, the Marquesas, the Society Islands, Fiji, New Guinea, the New Hebrides, and the Andaman Islands.
In his well-known work, The Beginnings of History (Scribner, New York, 1891, translated from the French with an introduction by Francis Brown), Francois Lenormant has a long section dealing with Flood traditions, pages 328-488. He opens his survey by discussing the Chinese so-called Flood traditions which he believes are fundamentally a record of an entirely local event. He then considers in some detail the Babylonian accounts which were known at that time, giving his reasons for viewing the biblical account as borrowed. From page 420 on, he deals with the Indian, Persian, Greek, Phrygian, Celtic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Mongol, Mexican, Guatemalan, Micuragan, Cherokee, Carib, Aleutian, Chippewan, Mandan, and Tahitian accounts. Lenormant's work is likely to be even more accessible than the two already mentioned, Frazer's and Andree's.
In his book, In Defence of the Earlier Scriptures, H. Sinclair Paterson has a useful appendix (pp. 283-313) in which will be found further details of Flood traditions from the following: the Welsh, Scandinavian, Dog-Rib, Caddoque and Cherokee Indians, the Chinese, Mexican, and Fijian traditions. The Assyrian account is treated more fully, and the Hindu story is given in full (pp. 288-96).
John Urquhart has a useful treatment of the subject in his New Biblical Guide (vol. 1, pp. 256-97), including references to many traditions mentioned in the previous lists, to which he has added the text in full of a tradition from the Lenni Lenape Indians (p. 264). He records also a tradition of the Malays, the Voguls, and the Persian account in some detail. Part of the text of Hesiod's account is given and also Ovid's. The Flood story which was discovered by George Smith is translated in full and compared in some detail with the biblical account (Marshall Bros., London, n.d., in 8 vols., long out of print).
Byron C. Nelson, The Deluge Story in Stone (Augsburg, Minneapolis, 1931), has a useful section on pages 170-90 dealing with the Assyrio-Babylonian legends, a Persian legend from the Zend Avesta, a Greek account from Syria (that of Lucian), the Apamaean Phrygian story, a Greek account from the Odes of Pindar, an Egyptian account referred to by Maspero, Ovid's account in full, the Lithuanian account, the Welsh, Lapp, and Vogul accounts, a possible Norwegian tradition known as "The Vala's Prophecy," a reference to a Chinese account that may be borrowed, the Indian legend from the Rig-Veda. He gives also a number of North American stories which include those usually referred to, but in addition an Eskimo story and a story from the Tlingit of the northwest coast of Canada. Several stories are given from Central and South America and from the Pacific Islands.
J. H. Titcomb, in a paper entitled "Ethnic Testimonies to the Pentateuch" (Transactions of the Victoria Institute, London, vol. VI, 1872, pp. 234-71), has a very useful treatment of the subject including a Chinese account (p. 238) which I have not seen elsewhere, and some details of the Hindu account, a Greek account from Thessaly, an Icelandic account, and full details of the rather uncertain Druid account.
Alfred M. Rehwinkel has a most useful section on Flood traditions on pages 127-152 in his book, The Flood (Concordia, St. Louis, 1951). Here will be found sections quoted in full from the traditions of a number of American Indian tribes (Tamanacs, Athapascans, Pepago, Arapaho, Algonquins), some details from the Mexican Flood tradition, and a story from the Sudan. The Dyaks of Borneo and the Battaks of Sumatra are referred to, as well as some other Polynesian and Micronesian accounts. Page 144 has a reference by Manetho to an Egyptian tradition; the next page, Plato's account with reference to the Island of Atlantis. A substantial portion of Ovid's account of Creation and the Deluge is given on pages 147-51. This is followed in chapter 10 by the Babylonian Flood account which is translated on pages 155-61.
James Hastings, in the five-volume Dictionary of the Bible which bears his name, includes an article by F. H. Woods under the heading "Flood." It is unfortunate that this dictionary (the 1904 edition) tends to be marred by unquestioning acceptance of the Higher Criticism. Nevertheless, the article, though irritating to an evangelical, contains much interesting information, particularly those sections which deal with alternative judgments apart from drowning that accompanied the Flood in some accounts, with the numbers of people or types of creatures which alone survived in other accounts, the methods by which escape was effected, and how the world was repeopled. Most of the stories to which reference is made appear to be derived from Andree's work. The article is useful but has to be read with a critical eye.
The fullest summary in readily accessible form of all the Cuneiform Flood stories from Mesopotamia will be found in almost any edition of George Barton's Archaeology and the Bible, published by the American Sunday School Union (Philadelphia). Abbreviated details will be found, of course, in Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias, such as International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Popular and Critical Bible Encyclopedia, and Imperial Bible Encyclopedia. Many commentaries on Genesis, especially those published in decades near the turn of the century, have useful though brief collections of Flood traditions.
THE SEARCH for the ark is much in the news these days in certain quarters. The mounting of alpine expeditions to survey Ararat may appear to many readers of current reports to be something new. This is far from being the truth of the matter. It seems worthwhile in the circumstances to set forth some of the background of such expeditions undertaken more than 150 years ago and reported in M. M. Kalisch's Historical and Critical Commentary on the Old Testament: Genesis (Longmans Green, London, 1858).
Commenting on Genesis 8:1-4, Kalisch wrote (in 1858):
Ararat consists of two unequal peaks, both of which disappear in the clouds; the loftier summit is 16,254 Parisian feet high, while the other northwestern pinnacle rises to the elevation of 12,284 Parisian feet above the level of the sea. Both are 12,000 yards distance from each other....
The plateau on which Ararat rises is of considerable height. But, viewed from the vast plain which skirts its base, it appears "as if the hugest mountains of the world had been piled upon each other to form this one sublime immensity of earth, and rock, and snow...
These two peaks of Ararat are separated by a wild and dark chasm, cutting deeply into the interior of the mountain, filling the spectator with horror and shuddering, and containing in its innermost recesses immense masses of never melting ice of the dimensions of enormous towers. And this stupendous and fearful abyss is probably the exhausted crater of Ararat, become wider than ever since the eruption of 1840, and since that catastrophe, exposing on its upper sides the white, yellow, and vitreous feldspars of which the mountain consists. Pious hermits seem, in that fearful precipice, to have sought refuge from the cares and vanities of the world...
The vegetation on the sides of the mountain is extremely scanty; stones, sand, and lava form their mass. Eagles and hawks soar around its majestic summits. In the hottest season only, the snow melts on the peak of the Little Ararat; and this event is used as a kind of calendar by the agriculturists in the surrounding villages. In September and October it is generally free of its hoary crust. But the Great Ararat is, for about three miles from the summit, covered with eternal snow and ice, and for the greater part of the year gloomily shrouded in dense and heavy cloud. The summit of this noble mountain forms a slightly convex, almost circular platform, about two hundred paces in circuit...
At the margin, the summit slopes off precipitously, especially on the northeastern and southeastern side. A gentle depression connects this pinnacle with the somewhat lower eminence at a distance of 397 yards. Here it is believed the ark of Noah rested.
The perils and fatigues of the ascent of this mountain are so considerable, that it was several times unsuccessfully attempted...The French traveler Tournefort undertook the ascent with the same inauspicious result in 1700 as the bashaw of Bayazeed in the beginning of the present [nineteenth] century. These disappointments rejoiced the hearts of the Armenians. For they considered that the sanctity of the mountain would be lost if its heights were searched by the curiosity of man. It is almost an article of faith with them that the summit of Ararat is inaccessible; and they firmly believe that the ark of Noah still exists on that solemn peak.
These convictions have been strengthened by ancient legends, busily spread and confirmed by the Church. It is reported that the monk James who was later patriarch of Nisibis, a contemporary of St. Gregory, wished to see with his own eyes the sacred ark; he tried an ascent; from exhaustion he frequently fell asleep; and when he awoke he invariably found he had slipped back to the point from whence he had started (!)...
However, in spite of this venerable tradition, the German traveler Dr. Parrot, after two fruitless attempts, effected an indisputable ascent of the summit of the Great Ararat on the 9th of October, 1829, and five years later in August, 1834, the tracks of Dr. Parrot were followed and his accounts verified by the Russian traveler Antornomoff. It is indeed not the fault of these two intrepid men, if their reports are disdainfully rejected by the pious Armenians as barefaced impositions.
The latest successful ascent was made in the course of 1856 by five English travelers (Maj. Robert Stuart, Maj. Fraser, Rev. Walter Thursby, Mr. Theobald, and Mr. Evans) who have considerably enriched our knowledge of these interesting regions.
They saw uninjured the oak cross which Professor Abich had in 1845 fixed about 1,200 feet below the peak of the cone, and the Russian inscription on it was still perfectly legible. But the fact that the ark was not found on the summit caused serious uneasiness, even to European scholars; they thought this a very untoward circumstance, and at last entirely renounced the idea that the ark landed on Mount Ararat. They now firmly assert that it happened to float merely in its neighbourhood at the end of the one hundred and fifty days, but that it was then slowly carried along in an eastward direction (cf. Gen. 11:2); and that the real place of its concealment is entirely withdrawn from human knowledge....
Another locality, which several ancient writers and translators assign to the Ararat (of tradition) is in the Gordiaean or Carduchian range which separates Armenia from Kurdistan. The Armenians call that peak the "place of descent," and Josephus maintains that, even in his time, remains of the ark were shown there by the inhabitants (Antiquities, XX, ii, 2); Berosus relates that the people value any part of the structure highly and use the pieces as safe amulets against mischief, with which account other authors coincide.
Nicolaus of Damascus mentions the Mount Bards in Armenia, above Minyas, as the place where the ark of Noah landed (cf. Josephus, Antiquities, I, iii, 5, 6); and the Mohamedans believe this to have been the mount Gioud or Dshudi, a little to the east of Jezireh ibn Omar, on the Tigris (Koran, xi, 46), at the feet of which there is still a village called Tsamanin, or "the eighty," because the Moslems believe that not eight but eighty persons were saved in the ark. At the top of this peak stands a mosque, and here was formerly a Nestorian convent, "the Monastery of the Ark," which was destroyed by lightning in the year 1776. The wood of the ark was said to have been preserved there to the ninth century.
All these localities might indeed be taken as the mount of our text with no less probability than the Ararat above described, except that tradition has not pronounced itself in their favour with such consistent unanimity.
In recent years a number of expeditions have had the same objective of finding the remains of the ark on Mount Ararat, the traditional site of its grounding, on the basis of a report of a sighting from the air supposedly made in 1917 by a Russian airman. For anyone who wishes to examine the record of this so-called sighting and these expeditions, the following documentation may be useful.
In 1917, supposedly testing out an aircraft with a supercharger which allowed the plane to fly up to 14,000 feet, an airman Roskovitsky is reputed to have sighted the ark. This report sparked an expedition of several hundred soldiers to climb the mountain. Subsequently a full report was given to the czar. Unfortunately the revolution brought an end both to the czar and the report, and the latter has never been actually seen by anyone since. The story is well known. Some of the circumstances were reported by Donald Wiseman in an article, "Hunting for Noah's Ark," in The Life of Faith (21 September 1949, pp. 733ff.). Also, Alfred M. Rehwinkel in his book, The Flood (Concordia, St. Louis, 1951, pp. 77ff.), has given a supposed verbatim account of Roskovitsky's report as published in The Banner of the Christian Reformed Church, dated 27 November 1942. The details of this were also given in full in Evangelical Christian (Toronto, June 1949, pp. 297ff.).
There is considerable doubt about the reality of this particular sighting, since aircraft without superchargers could not climb to 14,000 feet and it is believed that no supercharger was fitted at that time to a Russian or any other aircraft.
In his book, The Flood and Noah's Ark (SCM Press, London, 1955, pp.63ff.), Andree Parrot gave a carefully documented account of all the recent attempts up to that time to verify the story. He concluded that they were without foundation. In fact, he points out that at least two of the Christian papers which reported supposed "findings" subsequently retracted their statements. One German paper, Kolnishce Illustrierte Zietung, reported a sighting which afterward turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. Needless to say, the report appeared on 1 April. However, John Warwick Montgomery believes now, as reported in Christianity Today (7 January 1972, p. 50), that such an expedition did actually occur. Montgomery interviewed several relatives of the soldiers who took part in the expedition to the site in 1917. He has also made a most thorough and commendable attempt to track down the supposed reports made to the czar at the time and found that there is virtually no truth to some of the claims made for that report nor any hope of ever recovering the originals. (See his Quest for Noah's Ark, Bethany Fellowship, Minneapolis, 1972, 334 pp., illust.)
In 1949 an American expedition to the site, which included in the party an engineer and a physician among others, reported total failure, though they reached the summit. The famous photograph published in Life magazine in 1964 purporting to show the remains of a huge vessel high on the mountain has now been shown to be merely a rock formation. It is not impossible that it was this formation sighted from the air that sparked the report made in 1917 by Roskovitsky. An excellent report with beautiful photographs of the geological formation will be found in The Creation Research Society Quarterly for September 1976, by W. H. Shea, Ph.D., under the title "The Ark-Shaped Formation in the Tendurek Mountains of Eastern Turkey."
Since publication in 1972 of Montgomery's Quest for Noah's Ark, which is certainly the most thorough and scholarly to date, several other volumes have been published. Christianity Today (3 June 1977) reviewed three of these volumes: Search for Noah's Ark by Kelly L. Segraves (Beta Books, Chino, Calif., 1975); In Search of Noah 's Ark by Dave Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier, Jr. (Sun Classic Books, Los Angeles, 1976); and The Ark on Ararat: The Search Goes On by Tim LaHaye and John D. Morris (Nelson, Nashville, 1976). The reviewer--Montgomery himself--considers Segraves's volume the best of the three but identifies it as essentially a popular picture book rather than a serious examination of the evidence.
There is much that is naive in the present "popular" literature, unfortunately, and the Christian public is not being served too well by writers attracted to sensationalism. Reader's Digest carried an article entitled "The Mystery of Noah's Ark" (condensed from Christian Herald, August 1975) in which this statement appears: "Since [Ararat] is by far the highest mountain in the entire region, its peak would be the first to emerge from the water--and obviously the place to land" (p. 127). Can one imagine Noah and his three sons seeing the mountain emerge and deciding "That's the place to land" and so getting out sails or oars and maneuvering the huge barge-like vessel to a deliberate landing, having decided it was the obvious thing to do? Does not such an observation suggest really a total lack of imagination? Does one speak of a chance landfall of an unpowered vessel of such proportions as though it were the result of a deliberate decision made because the captain saw the emerging mountain as "obviously the place to land" his ship? Yet many readers will undoubtedly be misled into supposing that just such a sequence of events must have occurred, though how the ship was brought to this spot by the captain and his three-man crew has not been given a thought. Moreover, there is no certainty, as has been pointed out time and again, that the ark landed on this mountain. The Scriptures say only that it landed on the mountains (plural) of Ararat (Gen. 8:4), Ararat being almost certainly a district (Jer. 51:27) containing more than one potential landing site.
Almost every search has been directed toward the side, rather than the top, of the supposed site of landing. This seems difficult to justify unless one supposes that after settling at the top and unloading, the ark later slipped down the side. Is it likely that such a huge vessel would be so easily shifted--unless by an earthquake or a landslide? But the assumption always seems to be that this, the present supposed site, is where it landed. Then one must ask, How did it land well down the mountainside without the dry land having already appeared? If it had settled, let us say, 1,000 feet from the top, would not the 1,000 feet of exposed land from which the waters must have already declined have constituted "dry land" long before the ark touched down? How then can the ark be said to have bottomed some 74 days before dry land was anywhere visible?
The olive leaf brought back to the ark by the dove seems to suggest that the bird had found green trees at some elevation which must have been far below the elevation at which the ark is reportedly resting today. And if my argument has any force regarding the nonappearance of dry land when the ark settled, the ark must have landed at an elevation even higher than this. In that case, where could a dove possibly find an olive leaf at such a high elevation? Most of the land around was still under water. It was, moreover, an olive leaf "plucked off" (Gen. 8:11), i.e., not a bit of flotsam and jetsam but a leaf from a living tree. It may have been found some distance perhaps from the ark, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the ark was, in fact, not resting at an altitude of several thousand feet, and thus the olive tree had not been submerged under these thousands of feet of water: possibly it had been an olive tree on the crown of a rise of land like the Mount of Olives, and scarcely submerged at all.
In all the present sightings, either aircraft spottings or binoculars or mountain climbing has been involved, suggesting that the site of land was, or is now, difficult to reach. Many of the animals would have trouble descending to sea level...
The scenario we thus create may be quite unrealistic. Until we know with greater certainty what the phrase "the mountains of Ararat" actually signified to the writer, we are not in a good position to assert vigorously that the ark landed at an elevation of several thousand feet on what is now known as Mount Ararat.
The stories reported by early writers, like Josephus (Antiquities, I, iii, 5), of wood taken from the ark in the first few centuries of the present era almost certainly exclude any supposed site such as is currently in question, the visiting of which means the mounting of an alpine expedition with all the sophistication of modern mountain climbing equipment.
A GOOD FRIEND of mine, W. H. Pape, author of I Talked with Noah (Baker Book House, 1966), who spent some years in China, tells me that in the western part of that country the primitive Miao tribesmen have a Flood story of sorts. They say that two brothers plowed half a field one day but next morning they found all the furrows had been filled in. This was repeated the following day. So on the third night they hid to see what was going on and saw an old man carefully replacing all the earth which had been plowed. One of the brothers rushed out to kill the old man, but the other suggested they should find out why he did this. He told them a great Flood was coming and plowing was useless, advising them to make a boat to save themselves. Only one brother did so, and he survived. The other tried to use a shallow cooking pot as a boat, but perished.
Mr. Pape also pointed out that one Chinese sign for "boat" (a sign about 2,000 years old) is composed of three elements thus, (left to right: a, b, c and d.):
The root (a) or radical (b) means "boat." This is accompanied by a second element, (c) which means "eight," and by a third element, (d) meaning "mouth." When the Chinese talk of people, they use an expression which literally means "man-mouth." As we count heads, they count mouths. The Chinese ideograph for "boat" therefore has come to be closely associated with the idea of eight people, a fact which seems most reasonably accounted for by assuming that the tradition of eight survivors of the Flood already existed when the sign language was developing.
References:
35. Kalisch, M. M., ref. 26, p. 203.
36. Titcomb, J. H., ref. 4, p. 251.
37. Wardour, Lord Arundell of, ref. 7, p. 225.
38. Lenormant, Francois, ref. 27, p. 478.
39. Frazer, J. G., ref. 2, p. 270.
40. Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge (author, publisher, date unknown), p. 436.
41. Lenormant, Francois, ref. 27, p. 477.
42. News item in New Scientist, 27 March 1969, p. 672.
43. Nelson, Byron, ref. 4, p. 184.
44. Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge, ref. 40, p. 428.
45. Nelson, Byron, ref. 4, p. 190.
46. Urquhart, John, ref. 13, p. 270.
47. Wardour, Lord Arundell of, ref. 7, p. 25.
48. Lenormant, Francois, ref. 27, p. 478.
49. Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge, ref. 40, p. 131.
50. Goldenweiser, Alexander, Anthropology, Crofts, New York, 1945, p. 227.
51. Coon, C. S., ref. 11, p. 281.
52. Paterson, H. Sinclair, ref. 12, p. 296; and E. McCrady, ref. 12, p. 68.
53. Cook, F. C, ref. 6, p. 75.
54. McCrady, E., ref. 12, p. 68.
55. Eells, M., "The Worship and Traditions of the Aborigines of the Islands of the Pacific Ocean" in Trans. Vict. Instit. 32 (1898):68.
56. Titcomb, J. H., ref. 4, p. 236.
Corrections, August 15, 1997.
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