CHAPTER VII.
THE DELUGE.
As to the region where the deluge occurred—on the northern edge ascend the Persian mountains; on the east the steep and lofty parallel chains of the Indo-Persian boundary mountains, and on the south the plateau for a thousand miles along the Persian gulf and Arabian sea is bounded by the wild terraced regions of Beloochistan and Faristan. The second division includes the mountainous regions of Armenia, Koordistan, and Azerbijan. Here the table-land is compressed about half its general width. From this plateau, of which a part is mentioned in scripture as the “mountains of Ararat,” rises the volcanic cone commonly styled Mount Ararat, to the hight of 17,212 feet above the sea level.
The highlands of Syria rise gradually from the neighboring desert to the hight of 10,000 feet in Libanus and Antilibanus, and slope steeply in terraces down to the narrow coastlands of Phœnicia and Palestine.
Of the Syrian and Arabian lowlands, the south is hot and arid, with almost no oasis; but the north is watered by the Tigris and Euphrates.
Near this isolated corner of Asia, in the neighborhood of the Persian gulf and the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, where the deluge is supposed to have occurred, in the lowlands of that region, Chaldea, immense chains of mountains run in several directions, with highlands 10,000 feet above the level of the sea.
Verse 4: “For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.”
This deluge is supposed to have taken place about 2348 B.C. Hale puts it at 3154 B.C. The sons of God came upon earth and married the daughters of men about 2948 B.C.; about this date ought to be nearer the flood. Noah was 600 years old when he floated in his ark.
We will consider, first, a general deluge.