Noah’s Flood and the Philosophies of Men
- stephenstrent7
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
At this point, I am going to depart from my regular blogs that I have been posting for the past four years. If you want to keep pace with my blogs dealing with the Old Testament Come Follow Me weekly program, all of those posts are still on my website from four years ago. I am not going to repeat them here. Rather, each of the next several weeks, I am going to post a chapter from my new, forth-coming book, Noah’s Flood and the Philosophies of Men, beginning with Chapter 1 this week.
Chapter 1 The Flood of Noah: The Simple Version: My Opinion
I will begin this discussion by assuming that a family, Noah’s family, was living beside a river, some distance from the ocean. I will place their homestead at Adam-Ondi-Ahman, beside the Grand River in what is now Daviess County, Missouri. I do this because my theology, as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, teaches, in Doctrine and Covenants 116:1, that a place called Spring Hill, Daviess County, Missouri, “…is named by the Lord Adam-ondi-Ahman, because, said he, it is the place where Adam shall come to visit his people, or the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet.” Furthermore, we are told in Doctrine and Covenants 107:52-53, “Noah was ten years old when he was ordained under the hand of Methuselah. Three years previous to the death of Adam, he called Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah, who were all high priests, with the residue of his posterity who were righteous, into the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman, and there bestowed upon them his last blessing.” It is entirely possible that there are two different places called Adam-ondi-Ahman, but, for this story, I am going with the simpler proposition: that they are one in the same. (I have discussed this location in more detail in my book, The Infinite Fall, Cedar Fort, 2021.)
At some time in the distant past, roughly 4000 years ago, rain fell where Noah lived for forty days solid, with flood waters cresting at twenty-two feet (15 cubits) above flood level. Genesis 7:19-20 tells us, “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” We are not told where those fifteen cubits were measured from. I have heard some creationists claim that the fifteen cubits was the depth of water above the highest mountain. That is not what the scripture says.
Such a condition is not unheard of in the Missouri and Mississippi flood basins. For example, during the “Great Flood of 1993”, Missouri experienced torrential downpours for up to three months, from June to August. “There was measurable rain in parts of the upper Mississippi basin on every day between late June and late July. The persistent, rain-producing weather pattern in the Upper Midwest, often typical in the spring but not summer, sustained the almost daily development of rainfall during much of the summer.” Kansas City, Missouri witnessed a flood level of 48.9 feet, 16.9 feet above the normal flood level. In Grafton, Illinois, the Mississippi River remained above flood level for 195 days, between March and November, 1993.1
We are told in Genesis 7:12, “And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.” Apparently, the longest recorded period of continuous measurable rainfall is 331 days. That record was set at Manuawili Ranch on Oahu, Hawaii, between 1939 and 1940. If you include trace amounts of rain (not just measurable rainfall), the record extends to 881 consecutive days, also in Hawaii, from 1913 to 1916.2 The Pacific Northwest also experiences long periods of measurable rainfall during the winter, with Otis, Oregon, recording 79 consecutive days in 1997-98.3
The wettest tropical cyclone on record in the United States was Hurricane Harvey, which dumped 60.58 in (1,539 mm) of rain on Southeast Texas in 2017. Tropical Storm Claudette holds the national 24-hour rainfall record: 42.00 in (1,067 mm) in Alvin, Texas.4 So, if Noah’s rainfall was in that range, if it rained 42 inches every 24 hours for forty days, the accumulated rain would be 1,680 inches, 140 feet, or 93 cubits. So, a flood of 15 cubits, 22.5 feet, although substantial, doesn’t even set the rainfall record.
Great floods have occurred from time to time in many parts of the world. On July 4, 2025, the Guadalupe River, Texas, rose more than 25 feet in two hours.5 The three most devastating known floods in world history all occurred in China, in 1887, 1931, and 1938, killing a total of as many as 6.5 million people. The 1887 Yellow River flood covered an estimated 50,000 square miles. Some floods reach a high-water mark of as much as forty to sixty feet, submerging all but the tallest trees. The most destructive floods in US history were the 1927 and 2011 Mississippi River floods, moving 2 million cubic feet of water (enough water to fill 25 Olympic swimming pools) downstream every second. The 2011 flood, the result of record rainfall and snow melt, covered 4,600 square miles to a depth of up to twenty feet.6
As it began to rain, Noah’s family members loaded themselves and all their animals into a large ark, which God, in a vision, had commanded Noah to build, and which was greatly ridiculed by Noah’s neighbors. With the flood waters, which drowned Noah’s doubting neighbors, essentially everyone he had ever known, aside from his own family, the ark drifted down the Grand River into the Missouri River and then into the Mississippi River. From there, the ark drifted into the Gulf of Mexico, over 800 miles away from Noah’s home. Twelve miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, no land was in sight. As far as Noah and his family were concerned, the entire earth was covered with water—as far as they could see, even covering the highest mountains. It is entirely possible that Noah and his family, like so many other people for most of the world’s history, had never traveled more than one hundred miles from home, and had never seen an ocean.
From the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf Stream would have carried them northeast toward the west coast of Europe. That part of their journey lasted nearly a year. Exotic flotsam from the Americas has arrived on the west coast of Ireland, the Azores, and the Canary Islands for centuries. Stories of this flotsam may have helped inspire Columbus to sail west in search of a route to China and India.7
The next part of the story raises a major question: if Noah and his family were going to land in the middle east, where the rest of the Israelite story transpired, how did the ark get out of the Atlantic, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and into the Mediterranean?
At the Straits of Gibraltar, the predominant surface currents are west to east through the Straights and across the Mediterranean toward the Middle East.8 So once near the Straits, the currents could have driven Noah’s ark into the Mediterranean. But how easy is it for a ship drifting across the Atlantic Ocean to hit the pin-point entrance into the Strait? Current maps of the eastern Atlantic suggest that trans-Atlantic currents are pulled into the Straits of Gibraltar from over half way up the Iberian Peninsula, some 300 miles away,9 so, apparently the pin-point is not as small into the Straits as it might appear.
In early 2013, a bottle was apparently discovered on a Croatian beach, allegedly, containing a piece of paper with the following message, “Mary, you really are a great person. I hope we can keep in correspondence. I said I would write. Your friend always, Jonathon. Nova Scotia '85.” If that bottle was actually thrown into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1985, it had followed the ocean currents for 28 years over a distance of as much as 20,000 miles.10 Who knows how many times it had circled the Atlantic before entering the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar, and ending up on a Croatian beach.
This simplified version of the story of Noah’s Flood fits many of the criteria for the Flood story as recorded in Genesis. The elaboration of that story, including a discussion of how the Flood became “global” and what “global” even meant to people 4000 years ago, or even 1000 years ago, will be the material addressed in other chapters in this book. It is my opinion that the take-home message of the Flood story is one of obedience. Noah listened to and obeyed God’s warning, and by so doing, saved his family from a very real disaster. This story does not have to be about the entire globe being covered with water to a depth able to submerge Mount Everest. The story doesn’t have to include the destruction of all human life 4000 years ago, which may have seemed feasible to people a few hundred years ago, when Europeans and Middle-easterners knew very little about the world beyond their parochial boarders, but which does not fit with what we now know of recorded human history. The story does not have to include the idea that every living animal on earth was killed except for representatives of each “kind” taken onto the ark—from which all extant species of animals evolved in a brief period of 4000 years.
To me, all the unnecessary added complexity does not make the story of Noah more spiritual or God any more real. On the contrary, the mythology built up around the story makes the god of the story, to me, more unbelievable, as well as the story itself. In my opinion, a person does not have to believe the more complex, mythical story to be a “true believer”. I believe that, in this case, “…their fear toward me [the Lord] is taught by the precept of men…”11
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Larson, Lee W., The Great USA Flood of 1993; Presented at IAHS Conference: Destructive Water: Water-Caused Natural Disasters - Their Abatement and Control, Anaheim, California, June 24-28, 1996; nwrfc.noaa.gov/floods/papers/oh_2/great.htm
2. Wausau Pilot and Review, December 20, 2021, wausaupilotandreview.com/2021/12/20/whats-the-record-for-how-long-its-ever-rained-without-stopping
5. Hurt, Alyson, Connie Hanzhang Jin, and Brent Jones, Graphics: Where the Texas floods happened and how high the waters rose, National Public Radio, 2025; npr.org/2025/07/08/g-s1-76471/guadalupe-river-texas-flood-map
6. List of Deadliest Floods, Wikipedia
7. Meldrum , Jeffrey, and Trent Stephens, Who are the Children of Lehi? DNA and the Book of Mormon, Kofford, SLC, p. 74, 2007
8. Sverdrup, HU, et al., The Oceans Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology, Prentice-Hall, NY, p. 649, 1942
9. Path of the Gulf Stream, marine.coastal.edu
10. “A message in a bottle has washed up on the shores of Croatia 28 years after being thrown into the sea in Nova Scotia, Canada,” Digital Journal, digitaljournal.com/article/348150, April 2013
11. Isaiah 29:13