By Fr. Kelvin Ugwu
As we have seen in our first two series on Noah and the Ark, one obvious fact is that the biblical authors were not making a scientific claim about the entire planet. If they were, the whole story will be meaningless and at best a fairytale. Rather, the biblical authors were describing reality as they experienced and understood it.
Before we judge them and condemn the story, let us take ourselves to their time and thinking. It is not wisdom to use 2026 worldview to judge a text that was written more than 2,000 years ago.
Ancient people did not think in global terms. They had no concept of continents, hemispheres, or a spherical earth suspended in space. For them, the world was the land they knew, the rivers they depended on, and the skies above them. In fact, many of them even thought the earth was flat. The church, at some point, taught that, and even persecuted those who thought otherwise.
So when the Bible speaks of “the whole earth,” it is often speaking from human experience, not from geographical precision.
We still do this today.
We speak of the World War, yet large parts of Africa, Australia, and many indigenous societies had no direct involvement. To the powers that named it, their world was at war. The language was universal, the reality was not.
We say, “The whole world knows this song,” when in fact millions do not. We say, “Everyone was there,” when clearly they were not. We say, “She is the most beautiful girl in the world”, when in reality we have not seen all the girls in the world. Language stretches to emphasize impact, not precision.
This pattern appears throughout Scripture.
When Genesis says that “all nations came to Joseph in Egypt to buy grain,” it does not mean people from Australia or the Americas. It means all the surrounding nations known to the biblical world.
When Luke writes that “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled,” no one seriously believes the Americas or East Asia were counted. The phrase refers to the Roman world.
The Bible consistently uses universal language for regional realities.
So applying modern scientific expectations to ancient theological texts is a category mistake.
Worthy of note, which is of the fact is that, Mesopotamia lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. When both rivers flood simultaneously, the result is catastrophic. Archaeological evidence confirms severe regional floods in that area around the third millennium BCE.
For the people living there, such a flood would erase everything they knew. Cities gone. Farmlands destroyed. Generations wiped out. From their perspective, the world had ended.
So they told the story truthfully, but not technically. They spoke from trauma, not from cartography.
This explains why Genesis can speak of total destruction without requiring a global flood. The language reflects experience, not scientific measurement. It does not mean the whole animals in the world were housed in the Ark. Even the 40 days rain is theological not empirical fact.
But this leads us to the most important point of all.
If the flood story in Genesis is not science, then what exactly is it?
(To be continued)
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