SPECIAL QUESTIONS RESPECTING THE DELUGE
In studying the literature relating to the Deluge, we are constantly met by questions as to its so-called 'universality.' Was it a local or universal Deluge and if universal in what sense so? This is a point in which neglect or ignorance of the necessary physical conditions has led to the strangest misconceptions.
It is obvious that there are four senses in which a catastrophe like the Deluge of Noah may be affirmed or denied to have been universal.
1. It may have been universal in the sense of being a deep stratum of water covering the whole globe, both land and sea. Such universality could not have been in the mind of the writer, and probably has been claimed knowingly by no writer in modern times. Halley in the last century understood the conditions of such universality, though he seems to have supposed that the impact of a comet might supply the necessary water. Owen has directed attention to the fact that such a deluge might be as fatal to the inhabitants of the waters as to those of the land. In any case, such universality would demand an enormous supply of water from some extra-terrestrial source.
2. The Deluge may have been universal in the sense of being a submersion of the whole of the land, either by subsidence or by elevation of the ocean bed. Such a state of things may have existed in primitive geological ages before our continents were elevated, but we have no scientific evidence of its recurrence at any later time, though large portions of the continents have been again and again submerged. The writers of Genesis i. and of Psalm civ. seem to have known of no such total submergence since the elevation of the first dry land, and nothing of this kind is expressed or certainly implied in the Deluge story.
3. The Deluge may have been universal in so far as man, its chief object, and certain animals useful or necessary to him, are concerned. This kind of universality would seem to have been before the mind of the writer when he says that 'Noah only, and they who were with him in the ark, remained alive.' [55]
[55] Genesis vii. 23.
4. The Deluge may have been universal in so far as the area and observation and information of the narrator extended. The story is evidently told in the form of a narrative derived from eye-witnesses, and this form seems even to have been chosen or retained purposely to avoid any question of universality of the first and second kinds referred to above. The same form of narrative is preserved in the Chaldean legend. This fact is not affected by the doctrine held by some of the schools of disintegrators, that the narrative is divisible into two documents, respectively 'Jahvistic' and 'Elohistic.' I have elsewhere [56] shown that there is a very different reason for the use of these two names of God. But if there were two original witnesses whose statements were put together by an editor, this surely does not invalidate their testimony or deprive them of the right to have it understood as they intended.
[56] Modern Science in Bible Lands, chap. iv.
It is thus evident that the whole question of 'universality' is little more than a mere useless logomachy, having no direct relation to the facts or to the credibility of the narrative.