Although various ancient traditions refer to a lost antediluvian world, the one that stands out is the tradition in the early chapters of Genesis, because of its greater amount of detail and more historical authority. These chapters describe a world that was different from our own, and the question arises whether the differences reflect the world as it really once was or reflect a pre-scientific culture that speculated about it in error. What, in other words, was the source of the information?

As a text, Genesis cannot be older than its reputed author, Moses, and thus older than about the mid 15th century BC. There are, however, older writings from Mesopotamia – of a chiefly mythic or epic character – that contain recognisable elements of the same tradition about an antediluvian world, but broken up, rehashed and mixed in with new material. These suggest that there was once a common, oral, pre-literate tradition from which the author of Genesis and the various authors of the Mesopotamian stories separately both drew. A detailed case for this conclusion is made on another page. Here we will consider what can be deduced from the Genesis text itself.

The antediluvian hydrosphere

In the beginning, rain was not part of the natural order (Gen 2:5). The antediluvian world was watered by moisture which oozed through the soil from a body of water beneath the land, called the ‘deep’ (2:6, Tsumura 1989). Springs and rivers also got their water from this reservoir. If oceans had surrounded the land, their evaporation would have generated clouds and rain. However, Genesis does not say there were oceans. It says that the waters were gathered ‘into one place’ (one ocean) and were called ‘seas’ (plural – many seas, just as there were many rivers). The seas seem to have been lakes (as in ‘the Dead Sea’): bodies of water enclosed by land and supplied by the deep beneath the land. Psalm 24 specifically says that the land was founded upon the seas and rivers. The earth is pictured as resting on pillars sunk into a single, subterranean ocean, with fish living ‘under the earth’ (Deut 4:18). Rainbows were a new phenomenon in the post-Deluge world (Gen 9:13) because rain was a new phenomenon, the ocean from which moisture could evaporate being now on the surface. A completely new water cycle came into operation.

Here is evidence that the details of Genesis 1-6 were not the product of speculation, based on what Israel inferred about the present world. In any agricultural society, especially those of ancient Palestine, rain was of supreme importance, since it was the source of the water needed for growing crops and for sustaining the pastures that fed their animals. Egypt had the Nile, Mesopotamia the Tigris and Euphrates; the Israelites and the Canaanites had no major rivers, other than the Jordan along the eastern edge of the country. Palestine was a land of brooks and springs which drank from the rain of heaven (Deut 11:11). It depended particularly on the rains which came in the spring and the autumn, and if the rains did not come, the result was drought and famine. In Genesis 1-6, by contrast, the only mention of rain is the comment that it had not yet rained. At its formation the land was founded upon waters that were gathered underneath it, called the ‘great deep’, and it was this that sourced the springs and rivers that watered the land (Gen 7:11).

The natural assumption is that the Israelites based their picture of the antediluvian world on their perceptions of the present world, and that the picture was imaginary. But in fact the reverse seems to have been true. They described the present world as if it were essentially unchanged since antediluvian times. Jacob promised his son Joseph that he would receive blessings of heaven above and ‘blessings of the deep that couches beneath’. A psalm reminds the Israelites that the rocks which God cleft in the wilderness gave them drink ‘as from the great deep’, and Ezekiel says of a Lebanese cedar that ‘the deep made it grow tall, making its rivers flow round the place where it was planted’ (31:4). Fish lived ‘in the water under the earth’ rather than simply ‘in the sea’.

Such texts imply that an oral tradition about a differently constituted primeval earth was still current in the first millennium BC, and that it was this which provided the mental picture of what was underneath the present earth. Psalm 33, for example, states:

When we ask how the psalmist might have known that, the answer must be, not that he knew it by prophetic inspiration, but that he was alluding to a tradition known to everyone. It was part of the nation’s heritage, maintained by song as much as by narration (Job 36:24), and in their references to the tradition the psalmists themselves helped to maintain it. So did Solomon when he retold the acts of creation in a section of his Proverbs – the only new element was his personification of wisdom, the first thing to be created (Prov 8:22).

The tradition also seems to have been current in countries beyond the confines of Palestine. The inhabitants of the city-state of Ugarit, who spoke a language closely related to Hebrew, had an almost identical word for the deep, denoting the same idea. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia had the same idea but a different word, calling it the Apsu. They visualised the earth as consisting of three levels: the inhabited surface, a middle section where the dead resided, and the Apsu which shut in the ‘sea’ and was the source of all springs, marshes and rivers (Atrahasis, Seely 1997, Horowitz 1998). Most scholars assume that the Canaanites and the Israelites got their picture of the world from the Mesopotamians, by a process of cultural diffusion. In general, however, the cultures of the Near East were far from homogeneous, and a simpler explanation might be that the fundamental elements of Ancient Near East cosmology derived from a common tradition.

The antediluvian atmosphere

The present atmosphere is divided into layers: the troposphere, where packets of air rise and fall leading to changes in weather, the stratosphere, where the airflow is mainly horizontal, and various higher layers such as the mesosphere and ionosphere. It consists of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% other gases, and it thins with altitude.

We know nothing at all about the composition of the antediluvian atmosphere. It was probably thicker than at present, and it would certainly have had a different composition, for nothing ever stays the same. Oxygen levels peaked in the Carboniferous period, reaching around 35%. They were the cause of unusually large body sizes (e.g. dragonflies with 70 cm wingspans) and widespread forest fires. The proportion dipped in the Triassic to less than 15%. We infer that the atmosphere was thicker, because much of the primeval atmosphere would have been destroyed in the Hadean Cataclysm.

The antediluvian mantle

Originally there were no igneous rocks as such, nor rocks derived from them (such as sandstones). Creation theory postulates in the beginning the simplest state that could naturally lead to the present state. This would also have been the state of minimum entropy. Thus, below the great deep, the planet’s composition would have been homogeneous (not differentiated into crust, mantle and core) and ‘chondritic’, i.e. the same chemically as that of the other rocky planets.

At the surface, temperatures were suitable for life and thus temperate. Further down, they would have increased as a function of increasing pressure, along what is called the ‘adiabatic gradient’. If we assume an overall gradient of around 0.3 °C per km (similar to the present mantle), the temperature at the centre would have been around 2,000 °C, as against an estimated present value of 5,000-6,000 °C. With such a gradient the Earth’s interior would have been solid, melting only later as a result of thermonuclear fusion. After reaching peak temperatures in the early Archaean, it gradually cooled towards its present state where only the outer core is liquid. Thus the mantle was once hotter and more mobile than it is now. Nonetheless, even at its present temperature, its long-term behaviour is that of a fluid, convecting and bringing hotter material towards the surface where it melts and occasionally erupts.

Thermonuclear fusion – usually thought to occur only in the centre of stars – was able to occur deep in the Earth’s interior because the speed of light was once much higher. The process generated new elements and isotopes, many of them unstable, and released a vast amount of heat. As the isotopes decayed, they themselves emitted heat. Nuclear fission may also have played a role (Hollenbach & Herndon 2001). The solid interior therefore liquefied, from the centre outwards, and began to differentiate into chemically distinct regions of inner mantle and core. The overall temperature ceased to rise as (1) continuing decline in the speed of light brought thermonuclear fusion to an end, (2) the rate at which the unstable elements decayed into non-radioactive elements declined, and (3) decay reduced the amount of the radioactive material remaining. The present interior represents a return to the solid state (apart from the outer core), but now partitioned, and still giving out substantially more heat than is generated within.

The oldest minerals known are tiny crystals of the mineral zircon. They do not go back to the beginning, but do predate the Cataclysm. Their oxygen isotope ratios may indicate that liquid water was present, and impurities in the crystals may indicate that the interior was hot enough for granites and occasionally even diamonds to form. The mention of gold, iron, copper and quartz (onyx stones) in Genesis also implies magmatic processes, though we cannot infer that metal ores existed as ores right from the beginning. Probably a long period elapsed before the minerals separated out of the mix and rose to the surface in saturated fluids.

Volcanic eruptions are likely to have become more frequent as time went on. With the heat of the interior increasing, thermal pressure under the land also began to build up. As sometimes happens before a volcanic eruption, the springs which watered the land may have dried up under the pressure (as related in Atrahasis). Eventually, the springs exploded and the lithosphere disintegrated. Within 40 days even the highest mountains were shattered and submerged, hot magma now rising over their underwater ruins.

How much water remains locked up in mantle minerals is unclear. The total could be less than one tenth the amount contained in lakes and oceans or as high as one hundred times (Richard, Monnereau & Ingrin 2002). Some water enters the mantle through subduction of wet oceanic plates and is then recycled to the surface through water vapour outgassing along mid-oceanic ridges and volcanic arcs. The present deep water cycle may therefore be seen as the post-Deluge counterpart of the primordial deep. The peoples of the Ancient Near East were not entirely wrong in supposing that the great deep still existed in their day.

Earth’s lithosphere is appreciably less rigid, and wetter, than the lithospheres of the other rocky planets (Araki et al. 2009). This is consistent with the Earth’s being the only planet at creation to have had water. After the Cataclysm the water either escaped to the surface or became mixed with the upper mantle. The uppermost mantle appears to be saturated with water (Bolfan-Casanova 2005). Water weakens the lithosphere, and it is this weakness that, from the Archaean onwards, facilitated plate tectonics, just as it was mantle water that enabled granites and granite-based new continents to form.

The Sun

In the original creation the light that generated cycles of day and night came principally from a source beyond the solar system. Daylight was created on the first day, three days before the creation of the Sun. What was that light? Modern astronomy has brought us to the point where we can now give a definite answer. When we look back in time to the farthest reaches of the universe, we find that in the beginning there were only quasars, not stars in the modern sense. Quasars, the brightest single objects in the universe, were as bright as entire present-day galaxies, and it is from them that galaxies arose, as quasars ejected voluminous streams of plasma, and the plasma condensed into stars. The clouds of dust and gas permeating the arms of galaxies are the sparse remains, after star formation, of what was ejected from the centre.

Since our own Milky Way is also a galaxy, it too must have originated in this manner. In the beginning there was only a quasar at the centre, this being the source of the light created on the first day. Although it no longer exists, having long since shed most of its mass, a ‘black hole’ containing its collapsed remains still marks the spot. In this respect the Milky Way is unusual. Its central black hole is non-luminous, whereas the black holes at the centre of most galaxies – called ‘active galactic nuclei’ – are so massive that the matter falling into them produces enormous amounts of light.

The Sun began as a concentrated globe of pure hydrogen, because pure hydrogen is the simplest chemical state and a cloud of pure hydrogen gas will not, of itself, collapse into a star. So the Sun was shining from the fourth day and giving additional light. Its initial heat output would have been no more than 70% of its present output. If the Sun had been the only source of heat the Earth’s oceans would have frozen over. This is cosmology’s ‘faint young sun problem’, since geological evidence shows that the young Earth was actually warmer than it is today. In our view the light deficiency was made up by the Milky Way’s primordial quasar, while terrestrial heat loss could have been mitigated by higher levels of greenhouse gases.

The Sun’s present-day helium is the product of the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms. Its carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are fusion products of helium. Its other elements derive from asteroidal debris.

The Moon

The higher level of radioactivity was due to higher proportions of the decaying parent isotopes and a higher velocity of light (‘c’), to which rates of radioactive decay are directly linked. The decline in c was a change which affected the entire universe and must itself have had a physical cause, possibly to do with the energy of the vacuum (so-called). This is something that requires research. It is unlikely to be dissociable from the problems that, in current cosmological theories, the hypothesised existence of ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’ is designed to solve.

In addition to the eruption of the great deep, two other violent events rocked the Earth. One was the ejection of ionised gas from the centre of the Milky Way, the shock wave from which caused the collapse of the primeval vapour canopy around the Earth (Gen 1:7). This watery envelope was the main source of rain at the start of the Deluge. The other event was the explosive collision of two planets in the region known as the main asteroid belt, perhaps also caused by the shock wave. Asteroids crashing through ‘the windows of the heavens’ hit the Earth-Moon system about the same time as the rain, leaving huge craters on all the terrestrial planets.

Originally, the surface of the Moon would not have been cratered. Nor would any of the surface have been covered in the vast plains of basalt (maria) that erupted in the wake of the impacts. The non-random relationship between the age and longitude of the craters indicates that the bombardment may have lasted no longer than the time taken for the Moon to orbit the Earth one and a half times, or just a few weeks.

The Moon’s upper crust is mostly composed of anorthosite, an igneous rock rich in feldspar. As with other such rocks, it is igneous in the sense that when it forms from anything else, it crystallises out of magma. The solid state implies an earlier molten state because magma will cool and crystallise by itself, whereas the conversion of a solid rock to magma requires the input of energy. However, since the creation of rock ex nihilo itself involves the input of energy, that implication might not hold good for the very oldest rocks. Are cosmologists then mistaken in concluding that the anorthosite crust of the Moon crystallised from a ‘magma ocean’? Probably not. The Moon was totally resurfaced by magma in the time before the Cataclysm, as a result of the heat released by the rapid decay of radioactive elements in its interior. None of the rocks sampled by the Apollo missions go back to the Creation. Magmatism remade the lunar crust, which was quenched at the surface by water precipitated from outer space. Soon thereafter bombardment by asteroids shattered most of its surface, blanketing it with dust and ashes kilometres deep. The indistinct rims of the oldest craters show that the crust was still plastic when the first asteroids crashed down. Water absorbed some of the heat and made the anorthosite more viscous.

Antediluvian geography

Another piece of evidence that suggests we are dealing with an authentic tradition is the place names.

Because the old landmass was totally destroyed, a map of the world would have looked nothing like a modern map. The only remains from pre-Flood geography are names (e.g. “Tigris”, “Euphrates”), referring to features that cannot be correlated with their present-day counterparts.

The first place to be named in Genesis is Eden (the Hebrew word means ‘delight’). In the east of Eden God planted a garden, where he himself resided, and it is mentioned numerous times elsewhere in the Old Testament (e.g. Isa 51:3, Ezek 31:9). As a contemporary place, however, it is rarely mentioned (chiefly Isa 37:12 and Ezek 27:23), and because of its obscurity its location has never been convincingly identified. The Eden that was a byword in Isaiah’s and Ezekiel’s day for a land of fruitfulness was well-known only from the tradition about the creation. It was a different Eden, belonging to a world that no longer existed.

The toponyms associated with the original Eden are also irreconcilable with the geography of the Ancient Near East. Genesis tells us that a river flowed up out of Eden (that is, from underground) to water the garden there and divided while still in Eden to become four rivers. This ought to be a clue to the location of Eden, if the world in which the country existed were itself extant, for the rivers are named, and two of the names are well known: Tigris and Euphrates, the other two being Pishon and Gihon. Tigris and Euphrates are rivers running through Iraq, with their headwaters in eastern Turkey, and in the quest for Eden there have been attempts to identify Pishon and Gihon (e.g. Rohl 1998). However, they can hardly be said to succeed, and it is difficult to see how they ever could. There is no single river from which the Tigris, Euphrates and two others (which ought to be at least as impressive) branch off.

Pishon, moreover, was said to flow ‘round the whole land of Havilah’. Havilah is also mentioned in Genesis 10:7, 10:29, 25:18 and I Samuel 15:7, contexts which show that it must have lain far to the south of Israel, in southern Arabia. Since no river connects Turkey with Arabia, it seems safe to conclude that the primeval Havilah was a different country from the one that later bore the name.

Similar arguments may be made in relation to the lands of Cush (Gen 2:13), Assyria (2:14) and Nod (4:16). In Old Testament times Cush was the eponymous name for Ethiopia (Cush being the ‘son’ of Ham whose descendants settled that part of Africa after the Deluge), Assyria was the northern part of Mesopotamia, through, not east of, which the Tigris flowed, and Nod, to judge from the lack of its mention in any other Ancient Near Eastern text, had no post-Flood counterpart at all – perhaps unsurprisingly, in view of its association with the exiled fratricide Cain.

The apparent persistence of topographical names from the antediluvian world has therefore proved something of a red herring. In contrast to the few scholars who have claimed that they could identify the original Eden, most have concluded, from the impossibility of doing so, that the original Eden was a myth. However, the most likely explanation is that the names were re-assigned to the Near East by migrants who knew about such places from the traditions of their forefathers and wished to simulate continuity with the world that had perished, much as colonists arriving in North America sought to recreate what they called the old world with names such as Portsmouth, Cambridge and New York. The land of well-watered plains, abundant game, cereals, date-palms, and pulses evoked hopes that it might become a new Eden, and the two main rivers were named accordingly. Some of Mesopotamia’s most ancient cities were named after antediluvian patriarchs, such as Eridu (Eriduk), after Irad (Gen 4:18), and Uruk (Unuk), after Enoch, Irad’s father. When, around the end of the Jemdet Nasr period, the Euphrates breached its banks and devastated a number of the cities in severe flooding, people likened the disaster to the primeval deluge until eventually poets were describing it in the same terms, even to the extent of casting one of their kings in the role of Noah. This purely Mesopotamian flood was, however, a different and much later event.

As a clue to the landing place of the Ark, the reference to ‘the mountains of Ararat’ is also a red herring. Although located in the post-Deluge world, these were as much part of the Creation-Deluge story as the Tigris and Euphrates and were therefore equally susceptible to the process of toponym-transfer. The nearest mountains to Mesopotamia were the Zagros mountains. One possible candidate for the landing place is therefore the country or city in the Zagros called Aratta, which features in several Sumerian texts of the 3rd millennium BC (in Sumerian the name actually means ‘mountain’). According to the later Gilgamesh epic, where the Deluge and the Mesopotamian flood are conflated, the Ark came aground on Mount ‘Nimush’, possibly Pir Omar Gudrun, near Kirkuk. Old Testament texts mention a land of Ararat within reach of Assyria (Isa 37:38) and as forming an alliance with the kings of Minni and Ashkenaz (Jer 51:28), which tends to confirm an identification with the similarly named kingdom of Urartu, in Armenia. Although these texts point to a different location, the appropriate conclusion may simply be that the toponym had been transferred again: by the 7th century BC some new region had claimed the distinction. The association with Turkey’s Mount Ararat (Agri Dagh), a volcano which formed in the Late Cenozoic, seems not to be older than the 11th century AD.

As with primeval Eden, the quest for the remains of Noah’s Ark on the basis that it might exist anywhere in the Near East is the quest for a chimaera.

See also:
The primeval tradition of all mankind
The tradition in ancient Sumer
The six days of creation
The old world destroyed