The uncertainty indicated by the mission of the birds seems to have continued from the first day of the tenth to the first day of the first month, when Noah at length ventured to remove the covering of the ark and inspect the condition of the surrounding country, now abandoned by the waters, but not thoroughly dried for some time longer. Still, so timid was the patriarch that he did not dare without a special command to leave his place of safety. I am aware that if the two alleged documents are arbitrarily separated it is possible to see here some apparent contradiction in dates; but this is not necessary if we leave them in their original relation. [53]
[53] See Green, Hebraica, l. c.
It will be observed that a narrative such as that summarised above bears unmistakably stamped upon it the characteristics of the testimony of an eye-witness. By whomsoever reduced to writing and finally edited, it must, if genuine, have come down nearly in its present form from the time of the catastrophe which it relates. It follows that the narrator leaves no place for the current questions as to the universality of the Deluge. It was universal so far as his experience extended, but that is all. He is not responsible for what occurred beyond the limits of his observation and beyond the fact that man, so far as known to him, perished. If, therefore, as some have held, [54] Balaam in his prophecy refers to Cainite populations as extant in his time, or if Moses declines to trace to any of the postdiluvian patriarchs the Rephaim, Emim, Zuzim and other prehistoric peoples of Palestine, we may infer, without any contradiction of our narrative, that there were surviving antediluvians other than the Noachidæ, whatever improbability may attach to this on other grounds, and more especially from the now ascertained extension of the post-glacial submergence over nearly all parts of the northern hemisphere.
[54] Motais, Déluge Biblique.
Let it also be noticed that beyond the prophetic intimation to Noah, and the one expression, Jahveh 'shut him in,' which may refer merely to providential care, there is, as already remarked, nothing miraculous, in the popular sense of that term; and that mythical elements, such as those introduced into the Babylonian narrative, are altogether absent. The story relates to plain matters of fact, which, if they happened at all, any one might observe, and for the proof of which any ordinary testimony would be sufficient. It may be profitable, however, to revert here to the probable relation of this narrative to the geological facts already adverted to, and also its bearing on the mythical and polytheistic additions which we find in the Deluge stories of heathen nations.
Regarding the Biblical Deluge as a record of a submergence of a vast region of Eur-Asia and Northern Africa, at least, while no similar catastrophe has been recorded subsequently, it is unquestionable that submergences equally important have occurred again and again in the geological history of our continents, and have been equally destructive of animal life. It is true that most of these are believed to have been of more slow and gradual character than that recorded in Genesis, but in the case of many of them this is a very uncertain inference from the analogy of modern changes; and it is certain that the post-glacial submergence, which closed the era of palæocosmic man and his companion animals, must have been one of the most transient on record. On the other hand, we need not limit the entire duration of the Noachic submergence to the single year whose record has been preserved to us. Local subsidence may have been in progress throughout the later antediluvian age, and the experience of the narrator in Genesis may have related only to its culmination in the central district of human residence. Finally, if man was really a witness of this last great continental submergence, we cannot be too thankful that there were so intelligent witnesses to preserve the record of the event for our information.
It is needless, then, to enter into further details, though these are sufficient to fill volumes if desired, in proof of the remarkable convergence of history and geological discovery on the great Flood, which now constitutes one of the most remarkable illustrations of the points of contact of science proceeding on its own methods of investigation and Divine revelation, preserving the records of ancient events otherwise lost or buried under accretions of myth and fancy. I have already endeavoured to show that the earliest race of palæocosmic men, that of Canstadt, very fairly corresponds with what may have been the characteristics of the ruder tribes of Cainites, and that if we regard the Truchère skull as representing the Sethite people, we may suppose the Cro-magnon race to represent the giants, or Nephelim, who sprung from the union of the two pure types. I have also referred to the possibility that the Truchère race, so little known to us as yet, may have been a prot-Iberian people, possessing even before the Flood domestic animals, agriculture, and some of the arts of life, corresponding to what we find in the earliest postdiluvian nations. This is, indeed, implied in the fact that the postdiluvian nations present themselves to us at once with a somewhat advanced condition of the arts, especially in Chaldea and in Egypt. Such possibilities may serve to suggest to speculative archæologists that they cannot safely assume that all antediluvian or palæolithic tribes were barbarous or semi-brutal, or that there was a continuous development of humanity without any diluvial catastrophe. It is also somewhat rash to carry back the chronology of Egyptians and Babylonians to times when, as we know on physical evidence, the Valley of the Nile was an arm of the sea, and the plain of the Euphrates an extension of the Persian Gulf. It is fortunate for the Bible that such assumptions are not required by its history.