oah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth. And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives with him went into the ark, to escape the waters of the flood. Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah's wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark, they and every beast according to its kind, and all the cattle according to their kinds, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth according to its kind, and every bird according to its kind, every bird of every sort. They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. And they that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the Lord shut him in. The flood continued forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.

[1] Hydrologic analysis of flooding is undertaken by means of a standard hydrograph, which graphs rainfall and flood over time. A hydrograph for the biblical flood is shown in the figure.

[2] The Hebrew word "mabbal", generally translated as "flood" occurs nine times in this section of the bible, with few other uses elsewhere. Some argue that the related word "gabel", "ram's horn," implies that the flood is a seismic sea wave, on account of the "battering" implication of word. This suggestion is in any event offered by Mr. H. Hirsch Cohen's "The Drunkenness of Noah" which attempts to center the biblical flood narrative on the Mediterranean rather than in Mesopotamia. The author agrees that such explanations require two floods, since even mR. Cohen, for all his enthusiasm for the hebrew version, nonetheless accepts thte historicity of the Mesopotamian flood story.

The biblical story arises, he says, from the 1450 B.C. Thera event (but dated by Mr. Baillie two hundred years later) which produced short term disturbance of heat absorption followed by decades of climatic deterioration (a view well supported by the recent Irish tree ring studies). The Jewish writers grafted the Thera flood events onto the older Mesopotamian story but, being more optimistic than their Sumerian counterparts, elected to add on to the end of their flood story a promise by their god that the horrible scene would never again be repeated.

It appears that the era of extensive rich tropical wetlands gave way to a severe drought in the late sixth millennium BC, followed by an abrupt event that involved sudden melting of large areas of permafrost, or flooding of arid lands, or both. All of this is in accord with the ideas of ancient thinkers including the Greeks (especially Aristotle), the Sumerians (eg the epic of Gilgamesh) and of course the Bible.

The dating of the biblical flood has a long historywhich is described opn another page.

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