The Flood Narrative

"The description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood." -- John Walton and Tremper Longman, who go on to argue that it never physically happened that way¹

"The Priestly Code states with particular emphasis that it was quite universal, and went over the tops of the highest mountains." -- Julius Wellhausen, 1885²

"A compelling case can be made for seeing the event as worldwide, or universal, with respect to humanity, but less than global with respect to geography." -- Hugh Ross, Navigating Genesis, p. 154³

Summary

This article asks one question.  What does Genesis 6-9 claim, read as a text?  Not whether the claim is true.  The physical questions belong to Fossil Order and the Flood and Noah's Ark: The Logistics;  the worldwide flood traditions belong to Flood Legends Around the World;  the Mesopotamian tablets and the direction of borrowing belong to Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels;  the "sons of God" of 6:1-4 have their own article.  Here the subject is the Hebrew narrative itself:  its language, its history of interpretation, its composition, and its calendar.

1. The language is universal, and the scholars with the least reason to say so say so.  The particle kol ("all", "every") occurs 69 times in the 81 verses of Genesis 6:5-9:17, counted from the Westminster Leningrad Codex with a script published beside this article.⁴  The flood covers "all the high mountains under all the heavens" (7:19), to a stated depth (7:20), for a stated time (7:24), and kills "all flesh" on dry land (7:21-23).  John Walton and Tremper Longman, whose 2018 book argues that no such flood physically happened, still write that "the description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood," and that attempts to read the text "as knowingly describing a local flood" remain "unconvincing."¹  Julius Wellhausen, the founder of modern source criticism, read the Priestly account as "quite universal."²  James Barr, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, wrote in 1984 that he knew of no professor of Hebrew at a world-class university who thought the writer meant anything else.⁵

2. Six features of the story make the universal reading load-bearing rather than decorative.  A boat is built for 120 years when walking away would do.  Birds are carried, though birds fly.  Two of every land animal are taken "to keep their offspring alive on the face of the whole earth" (7:3).  The waters stand fifteen cubits over the mountains, which is the draft of a thirty-cubit hull and explains why the ark clears them (7:20, 6:15).  The flood lasts a year and ten days, with five months of rising water before the ark grounds in the mountains of Urartu, upstream of every Mesopotamian river.  And God swears never to do it again (9:11-15, Isa 54:9), a promise that has been broken every spring if the flood was local.  None of these is a figure of speech.  Each is a specification.⁶

3. The local-flood reading was invented in the 1650s, and the history Hugh Ross tells runs backwards.  Augustine defended the literal fifteen cubits over "the highest mountains" against pagan critics in about AD 420.⁷  Luther placed the ark's landing on the Himalaya because he took "all the high mountains" to require the highest mountain there is.⁸  Calvin wrote that Moses "copiously insists" on the forty days "in order to show that the whole world was immersed in the waters."⁹  The first Christians to argue for a flood confined to the inhabited Near East were Isaac Vossius (The Hague, 1659) and Edward Stillingfleet (London, 1662), and they said in print that they did it to remove the objection that there was not enough water.¹⁰  Ross's claim that the global reading was born in England and Holland in the late seventeenth century names the right place and time for the birth of the local reading.

4. The local reading's best evidence is real and should be stated at full strength.  Kol is used of limited things:  "all the earth came to Egypt" for grain (Gen 41:57), and Deuteronomy 2:25 puts the peoples who will fear Israel "under all the heavens," the exact phrase of Genesis 7:19.  The dove finds water "on the face of all the earth" while flying from a grounded ark (8:9).  Ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts use cosmic language for regional events, and Walton and Longman build their case on that rhetoric.¹  The reply is not that kol cannot be limited.  It is that a writer using hyperbole does not then give the water's depth, the day the mountain tops reappeared, and a covenant.  Hyperbole inflates;  it does not itemise.

5. Carol Hill's argument that the fifteen cubits favour a local flood fails on her own commentators.  Hill, a geologist writing in PSCF in 2002, suggests the "mountains" of 7:20 may be Mesopotamian hill country or even ziggurats, so that fifteen cubits of water over them means a plain flooded seven metres deep.¹¹  But 7:19 says the water covered "all the high mountains under all the heavens," and the fifteen cubits are explained by the ark's height in 6:15:  a thirty-cubit hull draws about fifteen.  Cassuto, Wenham, Whitcomb and Morris, and Hill's own cited source Bernard Ramm all read it that way.¹²  The number is there to tell the reader why the ark did not run aground on the peaks.

6. The Answers in Genesis list of twelve reasons against a local flood mostly holds, and this article grades it.  Nine of the twelve are sound textual arguments.  Two rest on physical claims about river floods rather than on the text.  One assumes a date for Babel that is itself derived, and should be dropped from a textual case.¹³

7. The source division of the flood story is a real pattern and a weak argument.  Wellhausen and, in colour-coded form, Richard Friedman separate a J story (Yahweh, seven pairs of clean animals, forty days of rain, three doves) from a P story (Elohim, two of each, a year-long cosmic flood, one raven, exact dates).¹⁴  The pattern exists.  But Gordon Wenham showed in 1978 that the whole of 6:10-9:19 is one palistrophe of 31 matched items turning on "God remembered Noah" (8:1), with the day-counts running 7, 7, 40, 150, 150, 40, 7, 7 in mirror image, and that the combined narrative shares seventeen plot points with Gilgamesh XI where J alone shares twelve and P alone ten.¹⁵  Either the two sources were joined before the Babylonian version took its late form, or there were never two sources.  John Emerton replied at length in Vetus Testamentum in 1987-88;  his reply could not be obtained for this article and is not answered here.

8. The "contradictions" between the strands are not contradictions.  Seven pairs of clean animals (7:2) are in addition to the pair of every kind (6:19), not instead of it, because the clean animals are the only ones Noah may sacrifice (8:20).  Forty days of rain (7:12) fall inside the 150 days the waters "prevailed" (7:24), because 7:11 to 8:4 is exactly five months.  Luther saw the second point in the 1530s and Cassuto set out the arithmetic in 1949.⁶

9. The calendar is exact and reveals the calendar it was written in.  Six dated entries run from the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah's six-hundredth year to the twenty-seventh day of the second month of the next.  The 150 days from 7:11 to 8:4 span five months, which only works with thirty-day months.  A year and ten (or eleven) days is the difference between a 354-day lunar year and the solar year, and Wellhausen already noted that the flood lasts "exactly a solar year."  The book of Jubilees, written in the second century BC on a 364-day calendar, silently moves the drying of the earth to the seventeenth so that the flood lasts exactly one of its years.¹⁶

10. The ark lands in a region, not on a peak, and the region is the wrong place for a river flood.  "The mountains of Ararat" (8:4) is the Hebrew for Urartu, the kingdom north of Assyria named in 2 Kings 19:37 and Jeremiah 51:27, in the highlands from which the Tigris and Euphrates descend.¹²  A flood in the Mesopotamian basin carries a boat down to the Persian Gulf, not up to Armenia.  Every flood layer archaeology has found in Mesopotamia, Woolley's at Ur (before 3500 BC) and those at Kish and Shuruppak (about 2900 BC), is a river flood of the plain, and Samuel Noah Kramer's verdict on Woolley's was that it was "far too early" and uncorrelated with the others.¹⁷  The Black Sea flood of Ryan and Pitman (7,150 radiocarbon years ago) is contested by later surveys and, whatever it was, was not the flood this text describes.¹⁸

Verdict.  The author of Genesis 6-9 described a flood that covered the whole earth and destroyed every land creature outside the ark, and meant it.  The hostile and the old-earth scholars who have looked hardest at the Hebrew agree.  The local reading is a rescue, first proposed in the 1650s to save the story from the water budget, and it costs the text its ark, its animals, its birds, its fifteen cubits, its year, its mountain, and its rainbow.  The source division and the calendar are real features of the text, and neither weakens the claim it makes.  Whether the flood happened is a question about rocks, and this article does not pretend to settle it.

Every source consulted is catalogued in the literature review and every quotation with its route of verification in the quotes file.

What the text says, in its own terms

The flood story runs from Genesis 6:5 to 9:17.  Its shape is simple.  God sees that human wickedness fills the earth (6:5-7, 11-13).  He tells Noah to build a box 300 by 50 by 30 cubits (6:14-16), to bring two of every land animal and bird aboard (6:19-20) plus seven pairs of every clean kind (7:2-3), and to bring food (6:21).  The flood comes on a named day (7:11), rains for forty days (7:12), lifts the ark (7:17), covers the mountains (7:19-20), kills everything with breath on dry land (7:21-23), and "prevails" for 150 days (7:24).  God remembers Noah (8:1).  The ark grounds in the mountains of Ararat (8:4).  Peaks appear (8:5).  A raven and a dove go out (8:6-12).  The earth dries (8:13-14).  Noah leaves, sacrifices, and receives a covenant with a rainbow for its sign (8:15-9:17).

The narrator dates the story to the day.  This is the whole set of dated entries, in Noah's regnal-style years:

The translations quoted below are the NET Bible unless marked.  The Hebrew was read from the Westminster Leningrad Codex as published by the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible project.⁴

The language is universal, and the strongest hostile readers concede it

The particle kol runs through every paragraph

The word the story leans on is kol (כֹּל), "all, every, the whole."  A script published in this article's research/ folder counts it in the Westminster Leningrad Codex.  In the 81 verses from 6:5 to 9:17 it occurs 69 times:  13 in chapter 6, 23 in chapter 7, 14 in chapter 8, and 19 in chapter 9.⁴  The noun 'erets (אֶרֶץ, "earth, land") occurs 46 times.  Hugh Ross, who reads the flood as regional, counts "more than 40" occurrences of "all, every, and everything" in chapters 6-8 and agrees that "it's their repetition that matters."³

The densest verses are the ones that describe what died.  Genesis 7:21-23 in the NET:

"And all living things that moved on the earth died, including the birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all humankind.  Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.  So the Lord destroyed every living thing that was on the surface of the ground, including people, animals, creatures that creep along the ground, and birds of the sky.  They were wiped off the earth.  Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark survived."¹⁹

Verse 22 in Hebrew is kol asher nishmat ruach chayyim be'appav mikkol asher becharavah metu:  "all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, of all that was on the dry land, died."  The writer stacks kol on kol.  Then he adds the exception, and the exception is one boat.

The extent is stated three ways in two verses

Genesis 7:19-20 gives the extent of the water horizontally, vertically, and numerically.

"The waters completely inundated the earth so that even all the high mountains under the entire sky were covered.  The waters rose more than 20 feet above the mountains."¹⁹

The Hebrew of verse 19 reads wayekhussu kol heharim haggevohim asher tachat kol hashamayim:  "and all the high mountains that are under all the heavens were covered."  Two kols.  Cassuto notes that the Septuagint read the verb as active, "and they covered," with the waters as subject, and that the Masoretic passive is the harder and better reading.⁶  Verse 20 gives the figure:  chamesh esreh ammah milma'lah gaveru hammayim, "fifteen cubits upward the waters prevailed," about seven metres.

Gordon Wenham, whose Word commentary is the standard evangelical treatment, comments on verse 19:  "Just how deep the water was is indicated by the high mountains' being submerged," and on verse 20:  "In fact the mountains were covered by at least 15 cubits (22 feet or 7 meters) of water, allowing the ark to float over them.  Apparently the story assumes the ark's draft was half its height of thirty cubits (6:15)."¹²  Cassuto, writing in Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1949, gives the same reading:  "the verse indicates that the depth of this layer reached fifteen cubits, in order to explain why the mountains did not halt the ark.  The height of the ark was thirty cubits (vi 15);  hence, even if we assume that only half its height floated above the water, it was able to clear the highest mountain peaks."⁶

The most capable old-earth readers concede the description

The concession that matters most comes from John Walton and Tremper Longman, two of the best-known evangelical Old Testament scholars of the last generation, in The Lost World of the Flood (2018).  Their book argues that Genesis 6-9 is a local flood "described rhetorically as a worldwide flood to make a theological point."¹  But their route to that conclusion passes through a chapter that concedes the description in full.  Proposition 5 of the book ends:  "The description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood.  Though some modern readers don't see it, the original audience would have understood that such a description is hyperbole."¹  Three pages earlier they write that "hyperbole permeates the account of the flood."¹  And on the reading that the text itself speaks of a regional event, they are blunt:  "the attempts to interpret the biblical text as knowingly describing a local flood remains unconvincing," so that "it is our conclusion that Genesis 6-8 describes a worldwide, not a local flood."¹

That is the first half of this article's verdict, stated by two scholars who hold the opposite view of what happened.  The disagreement is not about what the text says.  It is about whether the author believed it.

The same concession comes from the founder of source criticism.  Julius Wellhausen, in the 1885 English edition of the Prolegomena, describes the Priestly account:  "As the duration of the flood is advanced from forty days (JE) to a whole year, its area also is immeasurably increased.  The Priestly Code states with particular emphasis that it was quite universal, and went over the tops of the highest mountains;  indeed it is compelled to take this view by its assumption that the human race was diffused from the first over the whole earth."²  Wellhausen despised the passage;  he called the fifteen cubits "prematurely modern measuring and counting" that "simply destroys the illusion."  He did not doubt what it meant.

And it comes from James Barr, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and no friend of creationism.  In a 1984 letter to David Watson he wrote that "so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that … (c) Noah's flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark."  He added that the arguments that make the flood "a merely local Mesopotamian flood" are "not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know."⁵  The letter survives only in transcriptions circulated by creationist organisations, and no facsimile has been located;  it is cited here for what it is.

Six specifications that hyperbole does not supply

A writer inflating a regional disaster into cosmic language has a stock of phrases:  all the earth, every living thing, under all the heavens.  The flood narrative uses them.  But it also supplies things a hyperbolist has no use for, and each of them presupposes the universal reading.

The ark.  God's instruction is to build a vessel 300 cubits long and to spend the years before the flood building it (6:14-16;  cf. 6:3).  If the flood were regional, the instruction that fits every other rescue in Genesis is the one given to Lot:  leave (19:12-17).  Ross feels this and asks why God "did not deal with Noah's situation as He did with Lot's later on -- rescue by evacuation."³  His answer is that the ark was a testimony to the wicked.  The text's stated purpose is different:  "to keep them alive with you" (6:19).

The animals.  Two of every kind of land animal and bird are taken "to keep them alive" (6:19-20), and seven pairs of the clean kinds "to preserve their offspring on the face of the entire earth" (7:3).  If the same kinds lived beyond the flooded region, no animal needed saving.  The text's reason for the cargo is the reason a universal flood needs.

The birds.  Birds are on the manifest (6:20, 7:3, 7:8, 7:14).  A regional flood that lasts a year still leaves land within a bird's range.  The story lists "every bird of every sort" (7:14) among the passengers and "birds of the sky" among the dead (7:23).

The fifteen cubits.  As shown above, the depth is given to explain the ark's clearance over the highest mountains.  That explanation is only needed if the ark floats over mountains.

The year.  The waters rise for 150 days before the ark grounds, and the earth is not dry until a year and ten days after the rain began (7:11, 8:14).  River floods crest in days and drain in weeks.  Walton and Longman note that in the Mesopotamian versions "the flood lasted seven days and nights," in "stark contrast to the biblical account."¹  A story borrowing Mesopotamian hyperbole would have borrowed the Mesopotamian week.

The covenant.  God says:  "Never again will all living things be wiped out by the waters of a flood;  never again will a flood destroy the earth" (9:11), and sets the rainbow as the sign (9:12-15).  Isaiah 54:9 reads the promise the same way:  "the waters of Noah's flood would never again cover the earth."  If the flood was a Mesopotamian river flood, the promise failed in the next generation.  Answers in Genesis puts this as bluntly as it can be put:  on the local reading, "God would be a liar."¹³  It is the strongest single argument on the list, and it is not an argument from a word count.

The New Testament reads it the same way

The later biblical writers treat the flood as the destruction of a world, and they pair it with the final judgment.

2 Peter 3:5-7 sets the flood beside the end of the present heavens and earth:  "by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water.  Through these things the world existing at that time was destroyed when it was deluged with water.  But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire."  The Greek of verse 6 is ho tote kosmos hudati kataklustheis apoleto, "the then world, deluged with water, perished."²⁰  Ross reads tote, "then," as a restriction:  the world of Noah, not ours.³  But Peter's argument is a parallel.  The scoffers say nothing has changed since creation (3:4);  Peter answers that the same word that made the world once drowned it, and will burn it.  A regional flood is no answer to the scoffers, because a regional flood changes nothing about "all things."

2 Peter 2:5 says God "did not spare the ancient world, but did protect Noah … when God brought a flood on an ungodly world" (kataklusmon kosmo asebon epaxas).  Jesus in Luke 17:26-27 says that in Noah's day people ate, drank and married "right up to the day Noah entered the ark.  Then the flood came and destroyed them all" (apolesen pantas), and Matthew 24:39 has "took them all away."  Hebrews 11:7 says Noah by building the ark "condemned the world."  1 Peter 3:20 counts the survivors:  "eight souls."

None of these verses says "global."  Each treats the flood as the death of everyone outside the ark and as the type of a judgment that is not regional.  Ross concedes that "all references to and depictions of the Genesis flood" in both Testaments "support this ancient perspective" of a flood "universal, with respect to humanity."³  That is the whole of the New Testament's interest in the question.  It never distinguishes a flood that killed all people from a flood that covered all land, because in its telling all people and all land were the same thing.

The local reading is a seventeenth-century invention

Hugh Ross has argued for years that the word "global" is the anachronism.  His book Navigating Genesis (2014) states the thesis:  "The worldwide flood from which God rescued Noah and his family cannot -- and need not, for defense of biblical truth -- be put forth as a global scenario," because "the ancients had no such images in their minds.  The world meant people, the land meant the ground under their feet stretching from horizon to horizon."³  In a widely shared social-media post, reproduced in Eric's research notes but not fetched for this article, he goes further:  no Christian scholar before the late seventeenth century, and then only in England and Holland "when those nations developed a global navy," explicitly claimed the flood was global.²¹

The claim is testable.  Here is what the readers before 1650 actually wrote.

Augustine, about AD 420

In City of God 15.27 Augustine answers critics who say the flood story is only allegory.  His summary of their objection, in the Dods translation:  "they who contend that these things never happened, but are only figures setting forth other things, in the first place suppose that there could not be a flood so great that the water should rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, because it is said that clouds cannot rise above the top of Mount Olympus."⁷  The Latin is tam magnum fieri non potuisse diluuium, ut altissimos montes quindecim cubitis aqua crescendo transcenderet.⁷  Augustine's reply is that if earth can stand at that altitude, water can too, and that the ark was large enough because it had three decks.  He is defending the literal reading:  water fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, Olympus included.  Nobody in this exchange, critic or bishop, imagines a regional flood.

Luther, 1535-1545

Luther's lectures on Genesis were taken down by his students and published in the 1540s.  In the 1910 Lenker translation, on Genesis 7:11-12, paragraph 54:  "A volume of water, therefore, swept over the earth, from the sky as well as from the innermost parts of the earth, until at last the whole earth was covered with water, and the fertile soil, or the entire face of the earth was destroyed by the briny flood.  A like instance occurs nowhere in any book."⁸  On Genesis 6:13, paragraph 236:  "God gives Noah the revelation that he will make an end of flesh and earth, not in part, but of all flesh and all the earth.  Would it not be awful enough to partition the earth into three parts and to threaten destruction to one?  But to rage against the whole earth and against all mankind seems to be in conflict with God's government."⁸

His comment on the landing place settles what he thought the mountains were.  On 8:4, paragraph 20:  "It is generally believed that they are mountains of Armenia, close by the highest ranges of Asia Minor, the Caucasus and the Taurus.  But it appears to me that more likely the highest of all mountains is meant, the Imaus (Himalaya), which divides India.  Compared to this range, other mountains are no more than warts.  That the ark rested upon the highest mountain is substantiated by the fact that the waters continued to fall for three whole months before such smaller ranges as Lebanon, Taurus, and Caucasus were uncovered."⁸  Luther was wrong about Ararat.  But a man who reasons from "all the high mountains" to the Himalaya is not reading a Mesopotamian flood.

Calvin, 1554

Calvin's commentary on Genesis 7:17 in the Calvin Translation Society edition:  "Moses copiously insists upon this fact, in order to show that the whole world was immersed in the waters."  A few lines on he speaks of "the crimes of men, by which God was induced to destroy the whole world," and of "Noah's deliverance from the universal deluge" as Peter's figure of baptism.⁹  On 8:4 he follows "the opinion most received" that Ararat is in Armenia, "the mountains of which are declared, by ancient authors, almost with one consents to be the highest."⁹

Vossius 1659, Stillingfleet 1662, Poole 1669

The historian of this question is Davis Young, a geologist at Calvin College who holds the local view himself.  His The Biblical Flood (1995) traces the first proposals.  Isaac Vossius, "the son of a Dutch theologian, librarian to the queen of Sweden, and, later in life, a canon in the Church of England," argued in Dissertatio de vera aetate mundi (The Hague, 1659) that "There simply was not enough water on earth to have submerged all land," dismissed as "pious fooleries" any appeal to created and then removed water, and concluded "that the deluge was universal only in the sense that the entire inhabited world was overwhelmed."¹⁰  Three years later Edward Stillingfleet, future bishop of Worcester, in Origines Sacrae (London, 1662) "granted the validity of the criticism that there was not enough water on earth to submerge all land to any great depth (he calculated that if all the world's clouds were completely drained, only about a foot and a half of water would fall to the surface), but a localized flood would resolve that problem."¹⁰  Matthew Poole's Synopsis (1669) followed:  "It is not to be supposed that the entire globe of the earth was covered with water."¹⁰  Young's summary of the period:  "Even though some orthodox scholars such as Voss or Stillingfleet proposed a more restricted flood, the church at large felt little need to adjust its long-held view of a strictly literal universal flood."¹⁰

Three things follow.  First, the local reading has a birth date, and its parents said why they proposed it:  the water budget.  It was a rescue from the start, offered by men who believed the text and wanted to keep believing it.  Second, the place and time Ross assigns to the invention of the "global" reading, the Netherlands and England in the second half of the seventeenth century, is exactly the place and time the local reading was invented.  Third, the writers before 1650 who left an opinion, Augustine, Luther and Calvin among them, did not need the word "global."  They said "the highest mountains," "the whole earth," and "the Himalaya," which is what a person says who means the whole earth and has never seen a globe.

Ross is right about one thing.  "Global" is a modern word and the ancients did not picture a planet.  The question was never what shape they thought the earth was.  It was whether they thought any dry land, anywhere, stayed dry.  Genesis 7:19-23 answers that.

The local reading's best arguments, weighed

An honest audit states the other side's case at full strength.  These are the local reading's four best textual arguments, in descending order of force.

1. Kol is used of limited things

This is true, and the examples are good.  Genesis 41:57:  "People from every country came to Joseph in Egypt to buy grain because the famine was severe throughout the earth."  The Hebrew is wekol ha'arets ba'u mitsraymah, "and all the earth came to Egypt."  Nobody thinks Peruvians bought grain from Joseph.  Ross lists this with five other "worldwide" events that were not global, and adds Romans 1:8, where Paul says the Romans' faith is proclaimed "all over the world."³

The best example is one Ross does not use.  Deuteronomy 2:25 has God promise to put the dread of Israel "on the peoples under all the heavens" ('al pene ha'ammim tachat kol hashamayim).  That is the exact phrase of Genesis 7:19, tachat kol hashamayim, and in Deuteronomy it means the peoples of Canaan and Transjordan.  So the phrase can be limited.  Genesis 7:19 could, in isolation, mean "all the high hills of the region."

The reply is that the flood narrative does not leave the phrase in isolation.  Deuteronomy 2:25 gives no depth of dread, no duration, no list of the peoples who did not fear, and no covenant never to frighten anyone again.  Genesis surrounds its kol with fifteen cubits, 150 days, a manifest, a landing site, and a rainbow.  The argument from kol's range shows that the word could have been used loosely.  It does not show that this author used it loosely, and everything else he wrote shows that he did not.

2. The dove flew over "the face of all the earth" from a grounded ark

Genesis 8:9:  "The dove could not find a resting place for its feet because water still covered the surface of the entire earth" (ki mayim 'al pene kol ha'arets).  Ross:  "Right here in the context we have a clear indication that 'the face of the whole earth' can and does mean a particular less-extensive-than-global region," because the ark was already resting on a mountain and mountain tops had appeared (8:4-5).³

This is a fair point about idiom and a poor one about extent.  The narrator's camera is on the dove;  "all the earth" is what the dove could see.  But the same narrator has already told the reader that the peaks were bare (8:5), so he is not claiming water over the peaks in 8:9.  He is saying there was nowhere for a dove to land.  A phrase used from a bird's eye in 8:9 does not reset the meaning of the same phrase used from God's mouth in 6:17 and 7:4.

3. Ancient conquest accounts use cosmic hyperbole

Walton and Longman's argument is the strongest form of the local case, because it does not pretend the text says less than it says.  It grants the universal description and reclassifies it as rhetoric:  "employing universalistic rhetoric to portray the impact and significance of the flood as a cosmic cataclysm does not mean that the ancient Israelites or the author considered the physical scope or geographical range to be universal."¹  They compare Joshua's "all the land" and Assyrian royal inscriptions, where kings destroy "all" their enemies and cover the earth with corpses.

The argument has a cost the authors accept:  it makes the narrator say, at length and with numbers, something he knew to be false.  Hyperbole in a royal inscription works because the reader knows the conventions and the king has an audience to impress.  The narrator of Genesis 7 has no audience to impress and gives the reader dates.  Hyperbole is a matter of scale;  it says "all" when it means "a lot."  It does not fix the depth of the water at fifteen cubits, or record that the mountain tops became visible on the first day of the tenth month, or list a raven and three flights of a dove.  Those are the marks of a chronicle, and Wellhausen, who thought the whole thing fiction, called them exactly that:  "prematurely modern measuring and counting."²

Walton and Longman also owe an account of the covenant.  If God's promise in 9:11 is hyperbole, it promises nothing.  Their book does not resolve this;  it moves the flood's meaning to the level of theology and leaves the promise there.

4. Hill's fifteen cubits

Carol Hill's 2002 article in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith is the fullest recent local-flood case from a geologist.  On Genesis 7:20 she argues that har "can also be translated as 'a range of hills' or 'hill country,'" that the Sumerians called their ziggurats "mountain houses," and that the fifteen cubits may therefore describe water "fifteen cubits above the tops of ziggurat temple mounds" or "only fifteen cubits above the Mesopotamian alluvial plain."¹¹  She concludes that the verse "favors a local rather than a universal flood."¹¹

Her own next sentence gives the alternative:  "Or, as suggested by Ramm, does the 'fifteen cubits upward' refer to the draft (draught) of the ark;  i.e., how deep its 30 cubit depth (Gen. 6:15) was submerged in the water when the ark was loaded?"¹¹  Bernard Ramm was a local-flood advocate.  Cassuto and Wenham, quoted above, read it as the draft.  So do Whitcomb and Morris, who in 1961 wrote that "Nearly all commentators agree that the phrase 'fifteen cubits' in 7:20 must therefore refer to the draught of the Ark."²²  The reading is not partisan.  It follows from the verse before, which says the high mountains were covered, and from 8:4, where the ark grounds when the water falls below fifteen cubits over the peaks.

The ziggurat suggestion has a second problem.  The narrator of 7:19 wrote heharim haggevohim, "the high mountains."  A writer who meant temple platforms on a river plain had the word for platform.

What the audit shows

The local reading has real lexical evidence that kol and "under all the heavens" can be used of a region.  It has no answer to the ark, the animals, the fifteen cubits, the year, the landing in Urartu, or the covenant, except to call all of them rhetoric.  That is why its best modern advocates, Walton and Longman, have stopped arguing that the text describes a local flood and now argue that it describes a worldwide one figuratively.  The move is honest.  It also concedes the question this article asks.

Auditing our own side: the Answers in Genesis list

A Flood of Evidence (Ham and Hodge, 2016) gives, on pages 94-95, a bulleted list of reasons the flood cannot have been local.  The list circulates widely and was quoted at length in one of the exchanges that prompted this article.  Here it is graded.  Wording in quotation marks was verified against the printed pages;  the rest is summary.

Nine hold as textual arguments.  Two (7 and 8) mix text with physics, and should be labelled as such when used.  One (9) should be retired from the textual case.  The list is better than its critics allow and slightly worse than its authors present it.

Composition: one story or two?

The second question a skeptical reader brings to Genesis 6-9 is not whether it means a worldwide flood but whether it is one story at all.  Since Wellhausen the standard critical view has been that two originally separate accounts, J and P, were spliced together by an editor.  The general case for and against the documentary hypothesis belongs to Moses and the Pentateuch.  The flood story is the showpiece of that hypothesis, and it deserves its own examination.

What the source division claims

Richard Elliott Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? (1987) prints the flood story with J in ordinary type and P in bold capitals, so that "If you read either source from beginning to end, and then go back and read the other one, you will be able to see for yourself two complete, continuous accounts, each with its own vocabulary and concerns."¹⁴  His summary of the differences:

"The J flood story was about forty days of rain.  The P flood story was about a year-long cosmic crisis.  The J story had fourteen of the clean animals and two of the unclean.  The P story had two of each.  The J story had Noah sending out three doves (or one dove three times) at the end.  The P story had one raven."¹⁴

Wellhausen, a century earlier, drew the same lines and said which version he preferred:  J's, with its "idyllic and naive" birds and olive leaf, against P's "artificial, mathematical marking out of the framework."²

The doubled features are these:

Two of these are not doublets but details, and they are dealt with below.  The pattern of divine names is real.  The critical claim is that two whole narratives can be recovered, each self-contained.

Wenham's palistrophe

Gordon Wenham's 1978 article "The Coherence of the Flood Narrative" in Vetus Testamentum made three arguments that the story is one composition.  The first is structural.  Genesis 6:10-9:19 "appears to be a palistrophe containing 31 items," a structure in which "the first item matches the final item, the second item matches the penultimate item, and so on.  The second half of the story is thus a mirror image of the first."¹⁵  The scheme, from his page 338:

The hinge is 8:1.  Wenham:  "The turning point of the narrative is found in 8:1 'God remembered Noah.'"¹⁵  The day-counts run 7, 7, 40, 150, 150, 40, 7, 7, and in his Word commentary he adds that "Most striking is the way the number of days is inverted after 8:1."¹²

Wenham does not oversell it.  He calls the structure partly natural, since "Noah enters the ark with the animals, and then later they leave it.  The waters rise and then fall," and partly contrived:  the seven days of 7:4 and 7:10 are one week mentioned twice "partly to keep the literary balance," and the three weeks of 8:6-12 are compressed to two.¹⁵  He says the sacrifice of 8:20 does not fit the pattern.  This is what a real literary structure looks like:  clear in its bones, imperfect at its edges.  The palistrophe crosses the J/P boundary at nearly every rung.  H and I are J;  L, M, N, O are P;  the hinge at 8:1 is P;  the dove that answers the entry is J.

The Gilgamesh argument

Wenham's third argument is the one a skeptic should weigh most carefully, because it uses the critics' own favourite comparison.  Genesis 6-9 and Tablet XI of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic tell the same story in the same order:  divine decision, warning, command to build, obedience, entry, closing the door, the flood, universal death, the end of the storm, grounding on a mountain, the window, birds sent out, exit, sacrifice, the gods smell it, blessing on the hero.  Wenham tabulated seventeen such features.¹⁵  Then he ran the sources through the same table:

"Whereas the combined account in Genesis 6-9 has seventeen points in common with the Epic of Gilgamesh version, J by itself has twelve points in common with Gilgamesh, and P by itself only ten.  The most notable omissions from the J account are the warning to Noah about the flood, the command to build the ark, the grounding of the ark on a mountain, and the disembarkation.  The P version also has some notable gaps;  there is no divine decision to destroy mankind recorded, no command to enter the ark, no reconnaissance by the birds, no sacrifice and attendant divine approval."¹⁵

His conclusion:

"It is strange that two accounts of the flood so different as J and P, circulating in ancient Israel, should have been combined to give our present story which has many more resemblances to the Gilgamesh version than the postulated sources.  Perhaps it could be explained by assuming that the J and P versions of the flood story were in their original form much closer to each other than the relics of these sources now suggest.  Alternatively, one might suppose that only one source was used by the writer of Genesis, a source presumably similar to the Mesopotamian flood story."¹⁵

The point can be sharpened.  The Mesopotamian story is older as a written object than any date anyone gives the Hebrew text;  Jeffrey Tigay's standard study shows that Tablet XI's flood narrative was lifted almost bodily from the Old Babylonian Atrahasis epic, which existed by the seventeenth century BC.²³  So the shape of the story was fixed a thousand years before Wellhausen's P.  If J and P were independent Israelite retellings, each would have preserved a random subset of that shape, and their union would be a patchwork that happens to restore it.  The union instead restores it nearly whole.  Either the editor rebuilt the Babylonian sequence by accident, or the sequence was never taken apart.  Wenham's own preference is "one epic source which has been reworked by a later priestly editor."¹⁵  That is not the traditional view of Mosaic authorship either, and the reader should know it.

What the argument does not prove, and who disagreed

Wenham is careful:  "None of these observations is absolutely incompatible with the notion that Genesis 6-9 is compiled from two independent sources.  The documentary hypothesis may yet be defended, if one is prepared to posit a most ingenious and thorough redactor who blended J and P into a marvellous and coherent unity."¹⁵  Coherence is evidence of unity, not proof.  A sufficiently skilled editor can produce a palistrophe from two sources.  The Gilgamesh count is the sharper test, because an editor blending sources for theological reasons has no motive to reproduce a Babylonian plot sequence he may never have seen.

John Emerton of Cambridge answered Wenham and four others (Cassuto, Nielsen, Andersen and Radday) in a two-part article, "An Examination of Some Attempts to Defend the Unity of the Flood Narrative in Genesis," Vetus Testamentum 37 (1987) 401-420 and 38 (1988) 1-21.²⁴  The article sits behind JSTOR's paywall and was not read for this piece;  its content is not summarised here from secondary sources, and the reader who wants the strongest critical reply should go to it.  What can be said is that the editors of the 1994 volume that reprinted Wenham's article recorded the "recent emphasis on the literary unity of the story" as "noteworthy, despite Emerton's dissent," and that Wenham did not withdraw the argument in his 1987 commentary.²⁵

The doublets are not contradictions

Two of the alleged conflicts between the strands are worth settling on their own, because they are the ones a reader meets first.

Seven pairs or two?  Genesis 6:19-20 says two of every kind;  7:2-3 says seven pairs of every clean kind and a pair of the unclean.  These are not rival counts.  The second instruction comes later, at the point of embarkation, and adds a category the first did not need to mention:  the clean animals, which are the only kind Noah may sacrifice (8:20) and eat (9:3).  A pair of every kind keeps the kinds alive;  seven pairs of the clean kinds keep the sacrifice alive.  The critical reading has to make P forget that Noah sacrificed anything.

Forty days or 150?  Genesis 7:12 says it rained forty days;  7:24 says the waters prevailed 150 days.  These are different things.  Cassuto's reading:  "The Deluge lasted forty days (vii 4, 12, 17), that is, until the twenty-seventh day of the third month, and the waters prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days (vii 24).  The verb wayyighberu [literally, 'were strong';  E.V. prevailed] does not denote an action but a condition, the meaning being that the waters remained in their might upon the ground during one hundred and fifty days."⁶  The dates confirm it:  from the seventeenth of the second month (7:11) to the seventeenth of the seventh month (8:4) is five months, and 150 days is five months of thirty days.  Luther put it plainly four hundred years earlier:  "For forty days the ark stood in some plain.  By that time the waters had risen to such an extent that they lifted the ark, which then floated for one hundred and fifty days."⁸  Wenham agrees:  "Evidently the first forty days of heavy rain (7:12) were followed by 110 days of the waters' triumph."¹²

Neither of these needs two authors.  Both need one author who counts.

The calendar

The dated entries let the reader work out what calendar the narrator used.  This is the arithmetic.

From 600/2/17 (7:11) to 600/7/17 (8:4) is five months, and the text calls it 150 days (7:24, 8:3).  That is thirty days to the month.  Cassuto notes that "five lunar months comprise only 147 days, yet the Bible apparently preferred to use a round figure," which is one way to save a lunar calendar;  the plainer reading is that the narrator counted thirty-day months, as Egypt, Mesopotamia and the book of Jubilees all did in their schematic years.⁶

From 600/2/17 (7:11) to 601/2/27 (8:14) is one year and ten days.  On a 360-day year of twelve thirty-day months that is 370 days elapsed, or 371 counting both ends, the figure usually quoted.  On a 354-day lunar year it is 364 days.  Wellhausen chose the second:  "The flood lasts twelve months and ten days, i.e., exactly a solar year."²  The lunar year plus the eleven-day difference is 365, and the narrator's ten days is one short of that, so Wellhausen's "exactly" is one day generous.  But the general point stands.  The narrator gives a flood that lasts a lunar year plus the intercalary days, that is, a solar year.

The book of Jubilees, written in the second century BC by a Jew who kept a 364-day calendar of fifty-two exact weeks, saw the problem from the other side.  Its retelling of the flood follows Genesis for the start, "on the seventeenth" of the second month, and for the 150 days, "five months -- one hundred and fifty days," and the fifteen cubits.  Then it changes the end:  "on the seventeenth day in the second month the earth was dry.  And on the twenty-seventh thereof he opened the ark."¹⁶  Genesis 8:14 says the earth was dry on the twenty-seventh.  Jubilees moves the drying back ten days so that the flood lasts exactly one 364-day year and keeps the twenty-seventh for the opening of the ark.  A second-century editor fitting the flood to his sect's calendar is good evidence that the numbers in Genesis were fixed, exact, and already old enough to need adjusting.

Cassuto also records that the Septuagint reads the twenty-seventh, not the seventeenth, in 7:11, which makes the flood exactly one year by the Greek text's own reckoning.⁶  The Masoretic ten-day gap is the harder reading and the one that reveals the calendar, and it is the one this article follows.

What the calendar does not do is decide the extent of the flood.  It shows a narrator who kept a ledger.  The reader may believe the ledger or not.

Ararat is Urartu

Genesis 8:4:  "On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on one of the mountains of Ararat."  The Hebrew is 'al hare 'ararat, "on the mountains of Ararat," plural.  Wenham:  "'On the mountains of Ararat' does not mean on a mountain called Ararat, but on the mountains in the area called Ararat.  Ararat is the Hebrew term for Urartu, a kingdom north of Assyria (2 Kgs 19:37;  Isa 37:38;  Jer 51:27) later called Armenia, now part of eastern Turkey, southern Russia, and northwestern Iran."¹²  Early Jewish tradition placed the landing in the mountains of Qardu, Jebel Judi south of Lake Van;  the identification with the 5,137-metre volcano now called Mount Ararat is medieval.  Calvin's editors already knew this, and Calvin himself declined to decide between the Armenian sites.⁹  Carol Hill, arguing for a local flood, also puts the landing at Jebel Judi near Cizre, "within the northern boundary of the Mesopotamian hydrologic basin."¹¹

Two things follow.  The text does not claim the ark rested on a 5,000-metre peak, and creationist writing that insists on Mount Ararat is claiming more than Genesis says.  And every candidate site is in the Urartian highlands, which are the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.  A regional flood of the Mesopotamian plain flows south to the Gulf.  A boat that ends up in Urartu did not get there on a river flood.  This is Answers in Genesis's eighth argument, and it is a good one.

Genesis 11:2 adds a small datum.  After the flood, "when the people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there."  The Hebrew miqqedem can mean "from the east" or "eastward";  either way the movement is between the highlands and the plain of Babylonia, and the narrator places Noah's descendants in the upland before the plain.  That is the geography the text assumes, and it is the reverse of a story that grew up on the plain to explain a river flood.

Did it happen? The candidate floods, briefly

This article's verdict is about the text.  But three physical proposals are so often attached to the local reading that a reader needs to know what they are and what their own investigators said.

Woolley's flood layer at Ur.  In 1929 Leonard Woolley found eleven feet of clean water-laid silt above Ubaid-period remains at Ur and announced that he had found the flood.  Samuel Noah Kramer, the leading Sumerologist of his generation, reviewed the evidence in 1967.  Woolley's own description of the pit, quoted by Kramer, ends with "clean, water-laid mud" and workmen who thought they had reached virgin soil.  But the layer dates before 3500 BC;  the flood layers found at Kish by Langdon and Watelin in 1928-29 and at Shuruppak by Schmidt in 1931 sit above Jemdet Nasr remains, "an archaeological horizon ranging from about 3200 to 3000 B.C.," and do not correlate with Ur's.  Kramer's conclusion, following Max Mallowan, is that the Mesopotamian story "was inspired by an actual catastrophic but by no means universal disaster that took place, not as Woolley claimed, immediately after the Ubaid period, but some time about 3000 B.C."¹⁷  Kramer also notes that Mallowan, who dug with Woolley, recalled that in the 1920s "there was hardly a season either in the spring or autumn, when the desert did not, at least for a few days, assume the appearance of a lake."  Hill accepts the Kish-Shuruppak date and puts Noah at about 2900 BC.¹¹  None of these layers covers a mountain.  None is fifteen cubits deep over anything.  They are the ordinary floods of a river plain, and every archaeologist who has described them has said so.

The Black Sea.  William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposed in 1997 that when the Mediterranean rose to the Bosporus sill "at 7,150 yr BP," saltwater "poured through this spillway to refill the lake and submerge, catastrophically, more than 100,000 km² of its exposed continental shelf," and in a 1998 book connected this to Noah.²⁶  The hypothesis has been tested by marine geologists working the Marmara gateway and the Black Sea shelf.  Aksu and colleagues in GSA Today (2002) found "a 10-11 k.y. history of low surface-water salinities in the Marmara Sea," "persistent Black Sea outflow across the Bosphorus Strait," and a delta at the Bosporus exit active from about 10 to 9 ka, which they read as "a more complex and progressive reconnection over the past 12 k.y." rather than a catastrophic inflow.²⁷  Valentina Yanko-Hombach and colleagues, reviewing the geological, palaeontological and archaeological evidence in Quaternary International (2007), concluded that the data "do not provide evidence for any catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea in the Early Holocene," and that the archaeology "reveal[s] no recognizable changes in population dynamics between 14 and 6 ky BP that could be linked to an inundation of large magnitude."¹⁸  The question remains open in the literature, and Ryan revised the date to 8.4 ka in 2003.  But nothing about it matches the text.  A rising lake in the Pontic basin does not cover mountains, does not last a year and recede, and does not leave a boat in Urartu.

The Mesopotamian flood of about 2900 BC.  This is the candidate the Sumerian King List's "after the Flood swept over" and the Kish-Shuruppak layers point to, and it is the one Hill, Kramer and Mallowan favour.  It is a genuine river flood in the right place for the Mesopotamian story.  It is not the flood Genesis describes, for the reasons given throughout this article, and a Christian who identifies the two has to accept Walton and Longman's conclusion that Genesis is talking about it in language its author knew to be untrue.

Whether a flood of the kind Genesis does describe left physical traces is the subject of Fossil Order and the Flood and Fossil Order and the Flood.  Those articles report where the evidence goes against the young-earth model as well as for it.  This one has no standing to settle the matter, and does not try.

Common objections

Objection 1: "The Bible says 'all the earth' about local things all the time. Genesis 41:57, Deuteronomy 2:25, Romans 1:8. The flood language proves nothing."

It proves that the words could have been used loosely.  It does not show that they were.  The flood narrative does what no other "all the earth" passage does:  it gives the depth of the water, the number of days, the animals aboard and why, the date the peaks reappeared, the landing region, and a divine promise never to repeat the event.  Deuteronomy 2:25 uses "under all the heavens" and then names the peoples it means (2:26-3:11).  Genesis 7:19 uses the phrase and then says the water stood seven metres over the top of them.  A reader who wants to make 7:19 regional has to make 7:20, 7:21-23, 8:4 and 9:11 regional too, and none of them will go.

Objection 2: "Walton and Longman are conservative evangelicals and even they say it is hyperbole. You are quoting them selectively."

They are quoted at length and in context.  They concede that "the description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood," and that reading the text as "knowingly describing a local flood" is "unconvincing."  Their further claim, that the original audience would have known the description was hyperbole, is their interpretation and is reported as such.  The disagreement between this article and their book is not about what the text says.  It is about whether the author believed it, which is a question the text cannot settle and this article does not claim to.  What the article does say is that hyperbole is an odd label for a passage that gives dates and depths, and that the covenant of 9:11 cannot be hyperbole without ceasing to be a promise.

Objection 3: "The story is stitched from two contradictory sources. Asking what 'the author' meant is meaningless."

Grant the source division for the sake of argument.  Both strands describe a universal flood.  Wellhausen, who invented the division, says P "states with particular emphasis that it was quite universal."  J has God resolve to "wipe from the face of the ground every living thing that I have made" (7:4), reports that every living thing "was wiped off the earth.  Only Noah and those who were with him in the ark survived" (7:23), and ends with "I will never again destroy everything that lives, as I have just done" (8:21).  If there were two authors, both meant a flood that killed everything outside the ark.  The source division changes who said it, not what was said.

Objection 4: "Genesis borrowed the flood from Gilgamesh. The mountains, the birds and the sacrifice are Babylonian furniture, not claims about the world."

The relationship between Genesis and the Mesopotamian flood stories, and which way the borrowing ran, is the subject of Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels.  For this article the parallel cuts the other way.  If the shape of the story is Babylonian, then the Babylonian shape was a universal flood too:  in Gilgamesh XI "all the people had turned to clay," the boat grounds on Mount Nimush, and the mother goddess lifts her lapis lazuli beads and swears never to forget "these days."²⁸  The Genesis narrator kept the universal frame and changed the numbers:  the Mesopotamian flood lasts a week, the biblical one a year.  Borrowing, if that is what it was, did not make the Hebrew flood smaller.

Objection 5: "A worldwide flood is physically impossible. There is not enough water. So the honest reading must be the local one."

That is Vossius's argument from 1659, and it is a reason to disbelieve the text, not a reason to reread it.  Walton and Longman take the honest route:  they say the text describes a worldwide flood and that no such flood happened.  A reader who agrees with Vossius about the water should agree with Walton about the text.  What this article objects to is the third position, that the text itself describes a regional event, because the text does not.  Whether the water exists is answered, for and against, in Fossil Order and the Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.

Objection 6: "Fifteen cubits above the mountains means the mountains were fifteen cubits high. That is a hill, not a mountain."

The verse says fifteen cubits upward the waters prevailed and the mountains were covered (7:20), after saying that all the high mountains under all the heavens were covered (7:19).  The fifteen cubits are the margin over the highest peak, and they equal the draft of a thirty-cubit hull, which is why the narrator gives them:  the ark cleared the peaks.  This is the reading of Cassuto, Wenham, Ramm, and Whitcomb and Morris, who agree on little else.  Hill's ziggurat reading requires the narrator to have written "high mountains" when he meant temple platforms on a river plain.

Objection 7: "The New Testament never says the flood was global. It only says it destroyed the ungodly."

True, and stated in the article.  The New Testament never distinguishes a flood that killed everyone from a flood that covered everything, because it inherited a text in which the two were the same.  Its use of the flood is as the type of the final judgment by fire (2 Pet 3:5-7) and of the day of the Son of Man (Luke 17:26-27), and neither type works if the antitype is a river in flood.  Peter's argument against the scoffers, that the same word which made the world drowned it, is an argument from a world-sized event.

Objection 8: "Your own side's list from Answers in Genesis is apologetics, not scholarship."

It is apologetics, and the article grades it as such.  Nine of the twelve items are textual arguments that any commentator would recognise, and the strongest, the covenant of 9:11, is one that Walton and Longman's book does not answer.  Two mix textual and physical claims and should say so.  One should be dropped.  The list was checked against the printed pages of the book, which is more than its critics usually do.

Objection 9: "Nobody measures the water in a catastrophe. The dates and the fifteen cubits are the marks of fiction."

This is Wellhausen's sneer:  Noah "having apparently not forgotten, in spite of his anxiety, to heave the lead and to mark the date in his log-book."²  The fifteen cubits are not a sounding;  they are an inference from the ark's draft, which its builder knew, and the moment it grounded, which he felt.  The dates are the kind of thing a survivor of a year in a box would know better than anything else.  Whether the ledger is a record or a literary device cannot be decided from the ledger.  What can be decided is that a narrator who supplies it is not writing hyperbole, because hyperbole does not keep books.

Objection 10: "You concede Wenham prefers 'one epic source reworked by a priestly editor.' That is not Mosaic authorship either."

Correct, and the article says so.  Wenham's argument establishes that the flood story is one composition, not that Moses wrote it.  Authorship is argued in Moses and the Pentateuch.  The point that matters here is narrower:  the text is a unity, its calendar is one calendar, and its claim about extent is one claim.

Sources