Welcome back to Samus Poperi. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I want to ask three questions today about Noah's Art and the Great Flood.

Question number one, did it really happen, or is it just a retelling of older Babylonian stories?

Question number two, if it did really happen, was it a global flood or a local or regional flood?

And finally, question three, are we missing the point of the story

in asking these questions? Now, if you like videos like this, I encourage you to like,

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I can. All right. Question number one.

Is the story of Noah's Ark historical, or is it just a retelling of ancient Babylonian myths?

The case for it being just a myth is that we find similar versions of the Great Flood story

and things like the Epic of Gilgamesh and scholars date these texts to earlier than they date

the book of Genesis.

And so, the argument goes, the author of Genesis just reworked these pagan stories and replaced

their gods with the God of Israel. Now, that could lead to a complicated debate on the dating

and authorship of the book of Genesis, but I suggest we just leave all of that aside, because the true story

is a bit more complicated, because it's not just in Gilgamesh and Genesis that we find an account

of the Great Flood. As the archaeologist, John Henderson explains, we actually find similar

great flood stories around the world.

I think there's no doubt that almost every culture in the world has a flood myth,

a deluge story, because we developed as a species within this period of rising sea level.

So we find flood narratives everywhere from India to the new world,

and many of them, like the Greek myth of DuKalion, follow the same basic pattern.

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