The world that existed before the Cataclysm does not exist now, so we have no direct evidence of what it was like. Although many ancient traditions refer to it, our main source of information is the book of Genesis, the first chapters of which stand apart from other such traditions both in the greater amount of detail and in the more historical character of the narrative. In several respects these chapters describe a world that was different from that which we know today, and the question arises whether the differences reflect the world as it really once was or whether they reflect a pre-scientific culture that speculated about it in error. What, in other words, was the source of the information from which Genesis itself drew?

As a text in its own right, Genesis cannot be older than Moses, its reputed author, 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 story about the antediluvian world, only 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 primarily 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. Subsequently we may presume that rain supplemented the moisture that came from under the ground, since evaporation of the seas would inevitably have generated rainclouds. However, rainbows were a new phenomenon in the post-Deluge world (9:13, “I will set my bow in the clouds”), suggesting that light from the sun was too diffuse for rainbows to form. As on many a winter’s day in Britain, the sun may never have been visible through the atmosphere.

Here is intrinsic 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 direct source of the water needed for growing crops and for sustaining the pastures that fed their animals. Egypt had the Nile, and Mesopotamia the Tigris and Euphrates, but the Israelites and the Canaanites had no major rivers, unless one counts the Jordan running along the eastern edge of the country. Palestine was a land which drank water from the rain from heaven, with hills and valleys, brooks and springs (Deut 11:11, 8:7). 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 (11:17). 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 as well as around it, called seas (Gen 1:10, Ps 24:2), and the subterranean seas comprised the ‘great deep’ that sourced the springs that watered the land (Gen 7:11). The rivers were overflowing springs. Since the subterranean seas were connected to the marine seas, the water that drained from the rivers into the marine seas ultimately circulated back to the subterranean seas.

The tendency in modern scholarship is to assume that the Israelites based their picture of the antediluvian world on their perceptions of the present one. The former world being a creation of their own imaginations, they can only have described it on that basis. In fact the reverse seems to have been true. They tended to describe the present world as if it were essentially unchanged since antediluvian times. Jacob promises his son Joseph that he will 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).

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.

The antediluvian atmosphere, by contrast, was bounded by an upper layer of water vapour. This vapour had an insulating function, radiating heat back to the earth just as clouds do today. It also shielded the planet against harmful radiation from outer space – a function now performed by the much depleted ozone layer. Probably the atmosphere beneath the vapour canopy was thicker than at present; it would certainly have had a different composition. Oxygen levels peaked in the Carboniferous period when they reached around 35%, linked with unusually large body sizes (e.g. dragonflies with 70 cm wingspans) and widespread forest fires, and dipped in the Triassic to less than 15%. Much of the primeval atmosphere would have been destroyed in the Hadean cataclysm.

The antediluvian mantle

Today the interior is mostly molten, but it cannot be assumed to have always been so. In fact the presence of a great reservoir of water under the land would entail that the upper mantle, extending several hundred kilometres beneath the present crust, was originally cool. In which case probably no part of the interior was molten.

In recolonisation theory the lithosphere beneath this reservoir began heating up immediately after the Earth’s foundation, as a result of the decay of radioactive elements in the interior. Rates of radioactivity were initially much faster than today, and as the heat increased, so thermal pressure under the land 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, however, they exploded. The effect was that within 40 days even the highest mountains were shattered and submerged.

It is tempting to infer that originally there were no igneous rocks, nor, therefore, rocks derived from them (such as quartz sandstones). But if that were the case, it would be very difficult to visualise what the primeval landmass might have been composed of. Nothing in the Earth’s crust remains from that time, so we can only speculate. The oldest minerals known are zircons, and even they do not go back to the beginning, though they do predate the Cataclysm. These amazingly informative crystals show that liquid water existed at that time, and a hot interior from which granites and occasionally even diamonds formed. The mention of gold, iron, copper and onyx stones in Genesis also implies magmatic processes. Probably volcanic eruptions became more frequent as time went on.

How much water remains in the mantle following its depletion in the Deluge (whether as a constituent of hydrous minerals or within nominally anhydrous minerals) can only be guessed. The total could be less than one tenth the amount of water 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 wrong in supposing that the primeval great deep still existed in their day.

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 (so-called) vacuum. 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. As discussed elsewhere, the Moon could have been totally resurfaced by magma in the time before the Cataclysm, as a result of the heat released in its interior by short-lived radioisotopes. None of the rocks sampled by the Apollo missions go back to the Creation. Magmatism remade the lunar crust, after which bombardment by asteroids shattered most of its surface, blanketing it with dust and ashes kilometres deep. As can be seen from the indistinct rims of the oldest craters, the crust was still plastic when the first asteroids crashed down on it. Water molecules in the cloud of dust and gas ejected from the galactic nucleus then 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
Worlds in collision – a false start