An Atheistic Bible Study Of Genesis - Chapter Eight - The Flood Waters Recede

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One hundred and fifty days after the Flood waters rose through rain fall from the sky and erupting underground springs God remembers Noah, and the livestock on the Ark. This suggests God actually forgot about them for much of the duration of the Flood and its aftermath period. God now starts the process of making the waters go down again. God sends a great wind to drive the waters away. This would surely just cause the waves to rise and generate a colossal sea storm that would further jeopardize the Ark. God now finally stops the rain and plugs up the ground springs that were releasing water, but that would mean the waters were still rising for the 150 days after the flood stopped, even though there was no more land to swamp or drown. The retreating waters allow the Ark to run aground on Mountains in Ararat and the peaks of the mountains first became visible to Noah on the 1st of October, The Bible says Mountains, as if the Ark landed on multiple peaks in the region, which would suggest the Ark either broke up on hitting the rocks, (with portion settling on different peaks) or it was settled on the border between two separate summits. The Bible is referring to a wide region of Turkey dotted with multiple peaks, not a specific summit. Mount Ararat itself is actually a dormant compound volcano with a predominant ice-capped peak. It was not successfully climbed by modern mountaineers until 1829. Noah, his family and all the animals are supposed to have climbed down from this? Unlikely to put it mildly. The Bible is careful not to identify any specific peak as where the Ark hull lies, but many search for it and absurdly, quite a lot of adventurers claim to have found it. Forty days after touching ground, Noah finally opens a window on the Ark, indicating that it stayed closed throughout the voyage. The stench from animal dung in near non-existent ventilation must have been incredible – to the point of making breathing impossible. Noah now sends out a raven to see if it can identify where dry fruitful land lies. Why not leave the Ark to at least make use of the limited dry land immediately surrounding the boat? Just because a bird can reach potentially quite distant land with food doesn’t mean the humans or non-flying creatures could do so. The raven comes back with nothing. Noah then sends out a dove twice at seven day intervals before it returns with an olive leaf in its beak. After a further week, he sends the dove out again (the raven obviously fired from such reconnaissance work) and as the dove doesn’t return Noah concludes that it has found good dry land to settle on (without its mate). With Noah now six hundred and one years old, on his birthday (all those candles on the cake, wow), he finally opens the door and coverings to the Ark, to see some dry ground to set foot on. God gives commands to coax everyone out of the stranded boat at last. Twenty-seven days later the waters have returned to pre-flood levels (the water has receded considerably faster than it arrived) Given that it was an extinction scale event, and no vegetation could survive it (with no plants taken on the Ark) there should be no olive trees (for the dove to find) or any other kind of vegetation. Any animals that are not carnivores would have died off quickly. The others, including humans) very soon afterwards. Noah thanks God by burning some of the clean animal and clean bird endangered species on an altar as a sacrifice to God. God likes the aroma of the roasting meats and on the basis of that alone, vows to never destroy the world again, despite our enduring evil (an indication that Noah and his offspring and wives are not as pure as suggested in the very reasoning to save them from the mass drownings in the first place). The book ends with a poem in God’s words (allegedly), about how if heat, cold, day, night, the seasons, the planet itself endures, etc., he will leave them undestroyed. Spoiler alert – The Bible ends with the book of Revelation where God destroys everything again. Another broken promise. Arthur Chappell