Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
There are striking differences, however. Foremost among these is that in Hindu cosmo-
logy a great flood ends each era of the world, repeatedly wiping out humanity. Unlike
Noah's Flood, Manu's flood is not a unique event. It was just one of many world-destroying
floods. Other Indian flood myths variously invoked a rain of fire or food shortages that
tempted people to desecrate sacred trees holding the proverbial forbidden fruit. These
causes are quite different from those in the Hebraic tradition, in which debauchery and
wickedness become the root causes of the flood, and the Mesopotamian tradition, in which
humankind is destroyed for being a general nuisance. Perhaps these differences reflect local
embellishments as the flood story traveled beyond Mesopotamia.
While the origins of these differences are unknown, what is certain is that flood stories
evolved over centuries in the retelling, regardless of how or why they originated.
As geologists abandoned Noah's Flood as an explanation for the world's topography and
archaeologists kept digging for Mesopotamian flood deposits, literary scholars profession-
alized the study of the history of the Bible itself. Paralleling the emergence of geology as
a secular profession, historians began to formalize Bible studies, approaching the study of
the Old Testament with the same independence and intensity geologists used to study rocks.
Traditional interpretations of the Bible faced new trials as literary scholars concluded that
Genesis was compiled from older sources.
