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lated as “ground” rather than the whole planet (Judges 6:37), or as “land,” when it clearly
refers to a region such as the lands of Israel or Canaan (Genesis 2:11, 2:13, 13:9; Leviticus
25:9; 1 Samuel 13:3; 2 Samuel 24:8). When the same word can describe a local or regional
event elsewhere in the Bible, must its use in describing Noah's ordeal necessarily refer to
a global flood? Perhaps misinterpretation and quirks lie at the root of the belief in a glob-
al deluge. After all, repeated references to unicorns in the King James Bible demonstrate
the potential for meanings to become scrambled as words were translated from Hebrew to
Greek or Latin, and finally English.
3
By the close of the nineteenth century, Christian theologians generally considered it reas-
onable to suggest that Genesis provides a synopsized or allegorical explanation of how the
world came to be rather than a comprehensive history of everything that ever existed. With
this simple shift in perspective, the first chapters of Genesis come into focus as the found-
ation for establishing a moral context for seeing the world and humankind's place in it,
rather than an explanation of earth history. Reading Genesis as an epic poem intended to
instruct and inspire the first monotheists rather than as a thorough blow-by-blow account of
world history offers a reasonable way to solve otherwise awkward interpretive problems.
But however reasonable this approach may sound, it doesn't resolve the question of where
humanity's other flood stories came from—or why such stories were told all around the
world.
Building on earlier work by missionaries, anthropologists had compiled hundreds of nat-
ive flood stories by the early twentieth century. Missionaries, naturally, considered these
tales to be degraded versions of the biblical story. Social scientists were more inclined to
interpret the widespread distribution of flood stories as recording memories of prehistor-
ic disasters, or as reflecting subconscious propensities to create flood myths. Interestingly,
psychological hypotheses provide some of the most entertaining ideas. The celebrated pro-
fessor of Assyriology Heinrich Zimmern claimed that the story of Noah's Flood represen-
ted a Babylonian nature myth and that “the stories of Creation, of Paradise… and of the
the authoritative 1899
Encyclopaedia Biblica
, he maintained that the Deluge represented
winter, with the Noah figure rescued in the boat standing in for the sun god. Along similar
