Flood myths were found all over the ancient world, but there’s no concrete evidence to suggest any of them ever represented a factual event. Many historical catastrophes have been proposed as the root of the myths, these include; a tsunami that might have followed the volcanic eruption of Thera in 1600 BCE; the sea level rises at the end of the last Ice Age; exceptional flooding of the twin rivers of Mesopotamia, from where the earliest deluge myths are known; and flooding of water from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea.
Often the flood depicted is of a global nature, killing almost every living being, like in the biblical version. The very idea of a global flood is ridiculous, we have overwhelming archaeological and geological evidence to show one has never happened. It’s also a physical impossibility, there isn’t enough water on the planet to cover all the land. 96.5% of the earth’s water is already in the oceans, so sea levels could never rise that high.
The biblical writers perceived the world as being vastly smaller than we do now, as well as believing it was flat. In their simplistic world view the idea of a flood may have been perceived as possible. We must remember what many crazy things the ancient Christians and Jews believed to be true. Augustine seriously believed that giants had lived before the deluge. He wrote, ‘There is therefore no doubt that, according to the Hebrew and Christian canonical scriptures, there were many giants before the deluge’ (City of God 15.23). The Bible account states that Noah was the ripe old age of 600 when the flood came! (Genesis 7.11)
The flood myth also gives us an insight into the simplistic model of the universe that the Bible writers believed in. We are told that the floodwaters derived from two sources, one above the sky and one below the earth, ‘All the springs of the great abyss burst open and the windows of the sky were opened’ (Genesis 7.11). This is repeated in the description of the flood in the book of Jubilees,
‘And the Lord opened seven flood gates of heaven, and the mouths of the fountains of the great deep, seven in number. And the flood gates began to pour down water from the sky for forty days and forty nights. And the fountains of the deep also sent up waters, until the whole world was full of water.’ (Jubilees 5.24-5)
The earliest deluge myth we know of is the Sumerian myth dating to around the 17th century BCE, where the hero is a king called Ziusudra. Similar flood myths also appear in The Atrahasis Epic and The Gilgamesh Epic. In the Gilgamesh account the chief sky god An decides to destroy mankind, and orders the storm god Hadad to create the deluge. One man, called Utanapishti, is warned by the god Ea to build an ark.
The biblical flood myth of Noah was probably written sometime in the mid first millennium BCE. Like the rest of the Old Testament, it’s roughly contemporaneous with Greek mythology. Numerous Greek and Roman authors linked their flood myth to stories of great conflagrations in a cycle of mythological cataclysms. They also linked this cycle of cataclysms to the movement of the heavens over long periods of time due to precession. We call this movement the Great Year.
Over the course of 25,776 years, the sun appears to move backwards through the houses of the zodiac, in the opposite direction that it moves during a solar year. The Greeks appear to have seen this Great Year as having a summer and a winter, just like a solar year. The flood represented the winter and a great conflagration represented the summer. In the Zoroastrian version of the myth, it’s not a flood but a very harsh winter that destroys all life on earth. The hero of that story is Yima, he builds an enclosure on a mountain to survive the winter and takes two of every species of plant and animal.
A Babylonian poem called The Erra Epic suggests that the Babylonian flood myth also may have been about the change in the position of the stars. It has the chief god Marduk state,
‘Once, long ago indeed I grew angry, indeed I left my dwelling and caused the deluge! When I left my dwelling, the regulation of heaven and earth disintegrated. The shaking of heaven meant the positions of the heavenly bodies changed, and I didn’t restore them…I built another house and settled therein.’ (Erra Epic tablet I)
In the Greek variant of the deluge myth, Deucalion was the hero who was warned to build an ark by his father Prometheus. Ovid wrote of Deucalion,
‘Of all the men who ever lived, Deucalion was the best and the most upright, no woman ever showed more reverence for the gods than Pyrrha, his wife.’ (Metamorphoses 1.319-321)
This description of Deucalion is almost identical to the biblical account of Noah, ‘Noah was a righteous man, the one blameless man’ (Genesis 6.9). A Gnostic text called The Apocalypse of Adam treats Noah and Deucalion as one and the same person,
‘And God will say to Noah – whom the generations will call Deucalion – “Behold, I have protected [you] in the ark along with your wife and your sons and their wives and their animals.’ (Apocalypse of Adam 70.17-24)
The Jewish author Philo likewise stated, ‘This man the Greeks call Deucalion, but the Chaldeans name him Noah. It was in his time that the great deluge took place.’ (On Rewards and Punishments IV)
Another Greek flood myth was that of the legendary island of Atlantis, first written of by Plato in the fourth century BCE. Plato noted this cycle of flood and conflagration in his story of Atlantis,
‘There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water…Your story of how Phaethon, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burnt up things on the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on the earth…on the other hand the gods purge the earth with a deluge.’ (Timaeus 22)
The story of Phaethon is a Greek version of the conflagration myth. Phaethon was the son of Helios, and one day he decided to drive his father’s sun chariot. Unfortunately Phaethon lost control of the solar chariot, it rode too low in the sky and set fire to the earth.
It’s hard to know if this cycle of flood and conflagration was part of the earliest flood mythology, but it appears to be present in the Bible. There are two main references to the great conflagration in the Bible. One is the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, and the other is the prediction of a future final day of Yahweh’s wrath. Origen (184 – 253 CE) wrote about Celsus making the comparison between Phaethon and Sodom and Gomorrah, ‘The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their sins, related by Moses in Genesis, is compared by Celsus to the story of Phaethon’ (Against Celsus 4.21).
The philosopher Lucretius (99 – 55 BCE) mentioned this cycle of flood and conflagration in his treatise called The Nature of the Universe. In the section on cosmology he discusses how ‘Legend tells of one occasion when fire got the upper hand and once when water lorded it over the land’ (The Nature of the Universe 5.404-6). Lucretius wrote of the conflagration,
‘The victory of fire, when earth felt its withering blast, occurred when the galloping steeds that draw the chariot of the sun swept Phaethon from the true course, right out of the zone of ether and far over all the lands.’ (The Nature of the Universe 5.407-410)
He contrasts this with the deluge,
‘Another legend tells how water likewise once massed its forces and began to prevail, until many cities of men were drowned beneath its floods.’ (The Nature of the Universe 5.424–426)
Cicero likewise noted,
‘Even so the deluges and conflagrations which will inevitably descend upon the earth at fixed intervals will make it impossible for any glory we may gain in this way to be eternal – or even to last for any length of time.’ (The Dream of Scipio 15)
The third century Roman writer Censorinus overtly linked this cataclysmic cycle to the Great Year,
‘There is a Great Year, whose winter is a great flood and whose summer is a world conflagration. In these alternating periods the world is now going up in flames, now turning to water.’ (De Die Natali 18.11)
The writings of Nonnus of Panopolis also suggest that this cycle of flood and conflagration might relate to the movement of the stars due to precession. Nonnus described the flood of Deucalion with,
‘The rainy Zeus covered the whole sky with clouds and flooded all the earth. Zeus’ heavy trumpet bellowed with its thunderclaps, while all the stars moved in their appointed houses.’ (Dionysiaca 6.206)
And the conflagration of Phaethon with,
‘There was tumult in the sky shaking the joints of the immovable universe. The very axle bent that runs through the middle of the revolving heavens [and holds the constellations in their place]. Libyan Atlas could hardly support the self-rolling firmament of stars, as he rested on his knees with bowed back under this great burden…[and all the constellations and stars were thrown from their paths in complete disarray].’ (Dionysiaca 38.90)
Ovid also appears to reference the cycle in his retelling of the flood myth. He informs us that Zeus considered destroying the earth by fire, but instead chose water, as the world was fated to be destroyed by flames at a later date,
‘Now Zeus was on the point of hurling his thunderbolts against the earth, but he feared so many fiery bolts might ignite and burn the universe to the furthest pole. He remembered that a time was fated to come when the sea and earth and the dome of heaven would ignite, and fire destroy the mighty structure of the universe. So he laid aside the weapons forged by the skill of the cyclops, and decided upon a different punishment, to send rain down from the whole sky and destroy mankind beneath the waves.’ (Metamorphoses 1.253-261)
The cycle is also mentioned in the Corpus Hermitcum, the writings attributed to the legendary pagan sage Hermes Trismegistus,
‘God the creator, when he looked upon the things that happened, established his design, which is good, against the disorder. Sometimes he submerged it in a great flood, at other times he burned it in a searing fire.’ (Asclepius 73.25-34)
In the New Testament, the second letter of Peter also mentions this cycle,
‘There were heavens and earth long ago, created by God’s word out of water and with water; and by water that first world was destroyed, the water of the deluge. And the present heavens and earth, again by God’s word, have been kept in store for burning; they are being reserved until the day of judgement when the godless will be destroyed.’ (2 Peter 3.5-7)
The Gospel of Luke has Jesus describe this final day of wrath / judgement using imagery from the Old Testament myths of flood and conflagration,
‘As it was in Noah’s days, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man. People ate and drank and married, until the day that Noah went into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise as it was in Lot’s days, they ate and drank, they bought and sold, they planted and built. But on the day that Lot left Sodom, fire and sulphur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be like that on the day when the Son of Man is revealed.’ (Luke 17.26-30)
Numerous early Christian writers also noted this cycle. Justin Martyr wrote,
‘But the fire of judgement would descend and utterly dissolve all things, even as formerly the flood left no one but him only with his family who is by us called Noah, and by you Deucalion, from whom again such vast numbers have sprung, some of them evil and others good. For so we say that there will be the conflagration.’ (Second Apology VII)
Origen (184 – 253 CE), wrote of ‘a providence which either preserves earthly things, or purges them by means of floods and conflagrations…when the wickedness that is in it has become too great’ (Against Celsus 4.64). Augustine of Hippo similarly noted the cycle when he wrote of the final judgement, ‘Then shall the figure of this world pass away in a conflagration of universal fire, as once before the world was flooded with a deluge of universal water’ (City of God 20.16).
The Jewish writer Philo also mentioned this cycle,
‘The destruction of the things on the earth…is attributed to two principal causes, the indescribable violence and power of fire and water. And they say that each of these elements attacks them in its turn, after very long periods of revolving years. When, therefore, a conflagration seizes upon things, a stream of ethereal fire being pored down from above is frequently diffused over them, overrunning many districts of the habitable world. When a deluge draws down the whole of the rainy nature of water, the regular rivers and torrents overflowing…far exceeding the ordinary measure of a common flood.’ (Concerning the World XXII)
In the third century, the Christian writer Minucius Felix compared the Christian belief in a destruction of the world by fire with the teachings of Greek philosophy. He wrote,
‘In respect of the burning up of the world, it’s a vulgar error not to believe that either fire will fall upon it in an unforeseen way, or that the world will be destroyed by it…The Stoics have a constant belief that this world will catch fire once all the moisture has dried up. The Epicureans have the very same opinion concerning the conflagration of the elements and the destruction of the world. Plato says that parts of the world are now inundated, and are now burnt up by alternate changes.’ (The Octavius 34)
A fourth century apocryphal Christian work known as The Testament of Adam also notes the link between flood and conflagration,
‘Behold a flood shall come and shall wash the whole earth because of the children of Cain, the murderer, who slew his brother though jealousy, because of his sister Lud. And after the flood and many weeks the latter days shall come, and everything shall be completed, and his time shall come and fire shall consume everything which is found before God, and the earth shall be sanctified, and the Lord of Lords shall walk about on it.’
In the second century, Celsus noted that the Christians didn’t understand the mythology that underpinned their apocalyptic beliefs,
‘The belief has spread among them, from a misunderstanding of the accounts of these occurrences, that after lengthened cycles of time, and the returns and conjunctions of planets, conflagrations and floods happen, and because after the last flood, which took place in the time of Deucalion, the cycle requires a conflagration. This made them give utterance to the erroneous opinion that God will descend, bringing fire like a torturer.’ (Against Celsus 4.11)
The belief that the world would be cleansed in a final conflagration may also have been represented in some Greek literature. A great fire was a set piece that ended several Greek plays and myths. At the end of The Odyssey, after killing the suitors of his wife Penelope, Odysseus sets fire to the great hall of his palace,
‘“The first thing I want”, the calculating Odysseus replied, “is a fire to purify this hall.”’ (The Odyssey 22.490)
The same ending occurs in The Bacchae, where Dionysus frees his imprisoned followers and sets fire to King Pentheus’ palace. Dionysus tells his devotees,
‘Let fiery lightning strike right now.
Kindle the conflagration of Pentheus’ palace!’ (The Bacchae 594)
There may also be a link to the celestial pole in flood myths. In The Gilgamesh Epic the flood lasted for six days and seven nights, then the waters receded and the ark was left grounded on Mount Nimush,
‘I scanned the horizons, the edge of the ocean,
in fourteen places there rose an island.
On the mountain of Nimush the boat ran aground,
Mount Nimush held the boat fast, allowed it no motion.’ (Epic of Gilgamesh xi.140-3)
In the Genesis version of the flood myth, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. These peaks on which the boats come to rest may represent the celestial pole. The holy mountain was a common motif for the axis / pole. The deluge stories tell us that the arks are held fast and allowed no motion on these mountains, just like the inert polar stars at the axis. In the Greek version of the flood story, Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha are the couple who survive in an ark which finally came to rest on Mount Parnassus. This is the same peak on which the omphalos at Delphi was later built.
In the Indian version of the flood myth, the boat comes to rest on the northern mountain. The survivor Manu is told to fasten it to a tree, the other main symbol of the world axis. In the Norse variant of the myth, the giant Bergelmir escapes the flood by climbing up onto his mill. The mill was a metaphor for the world axis in Norse mythology, as a millstone had an upper stone that rotated (like the heavens in the ancient model of the cosmos) and a stationary lower stone (like the earth). The name Bergelmir means ‘Bear yeller’ or ‘Mountain yeller’, possibly linking him to the pole / axis.
There are elements to some of the flood myths that link it back to the primeval slaying of the (celestial) dragon. The Rig Veda suggests that the flood waters were released after Indra killed the dragon Vrtra, ‘He killed the dragon and pierced an opening for the waters’ (Rig Veda 1.32). In the Dionysiaca, Nonnus also describes a deluge after Zeus slays Typhon (Dionysiaca 2.631-649). Similarly in Norse mythology, the flood occurred after Odin had created the world by slaying the primeval giant Ymir (Prose Edda 7).
In Chinese mythology, the flood was caused by the serpentine deity Gonggong after he lost a battle with the god Zhurong. Gonggong caused the flood by banging his head into mount Buzhou, that was the pillar that supported the sky.
The Bible and Mythology 