perished by the flood. The language of the book of Genesis does not compel us to suppose that the
whole surface of the globe was actually covered with water, if the evidence of geology requires us
to adopt the hypothesis of a partial deluge. It is natural to suppose it that the writer, when he speaks
of “all flesh,” “all in whose nostrils was the breath of life” refers only to his own locality. This sort
of language is common enough in the Bible when only a small part of the globe is intended. Thus,
for instance, it is said that “all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn and that” a decree
went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” The truth of the biblical narrative
is confirmed by the numerous traditions of other nations, which have preserved the memory of a
great and destructive flood, from which but a small part of mankind escaped. They seem to point
back to a common centre whence they were carried by the different families of man as they wandered
east and west. The traditions which come nearest to the biblical account are those of the nations of
western Asia. Foremost among these is the Chaldean. Other notices of a flood may be found in the
Phoenician mythology. There is a medal of Apamea in Phrygia, struck as late as the time of Septimius
Severus, in which the Phrygian deluge is commemorated. This medal represents a kind of a square
vessel floating in the water. Through an opening in it are seen two persons, a man and a woman.
Upon the top of this chest or ark is perched a bird, whilst another flies toward it carrying a branch
between its feet. Before the vessel are represented the same pair as having just, quitted it and got
upon the dry land. Singularly enough, too, on some specimens of this medal the letters NO or NOE
have been found on the vessel, as in the cut on p. 454. (Tayler Lewis deduces the partial extent of
the flood from the very face of the Hebrew text.” “Earth,” where if speaks of “all the earth,” often
is, and here should be, translated “land,” the home of the race, from which there appears to have
been little inclination to wander. Even after the flood God had to compel them to disperse. “Under
the whole heavens” simply includes the horizon reaching around “all the land” the visible horizon.
We still use the words in the same sense and so does the Bible. Nearly all commentators now agree
on the partial extent of the deluge. If is probable also that the crimes and violence of the previous
age had greatly diminished the population, and that they would have utterly exterminated the race
had not God in this way saved out some good seed from their destruction. So that the flood, by
appearing to destroy the race, really saved the world from destruction .—ED.) (The scene of the
deluge—Hugh Miller, in his “Testimony of the Rocks,” argues that there is a remarkable portion
of the globe, chiefly on the Asiatic continent, though it extends into Europe, and which is nearly
equal to all Europe in extent, whose rivers (some of them the Volga, Oural, Sihon, Kour and the
Amoo, of great size) do not fall into the ocean, but, on the contrary are all turned inward, losing
themselves in the eastern part of the tract, in the lakes of a rainless district in the western parts into
such seas as the Caspian and the Aral. In this region there are extensive districts still under the level
of the ocean. Vast plains white with salt and charged with sea-shells, show that the Caspian Sea
was at no distant period greatly more extensive than it is now. With the well-known facts, then,
before us regarding this depressed Asiatic region, let us suppose that the human family, still
amounting to several millions, though greatly reduced by exterminating wars and exhausting vices,
were congregated in that tract of country which, extending eastward from the modern Ararat to far
beyond the Sea of Aral, includes the original Caucasian centre of the race. Let us suppose that, the
hour of judgment having arrived, the land began gradually to sink (as the tract in the Run of Cutch
sank in the year 1819) equably for forty days at the rate of about 400 feet per day a rate not twice
greater than that at which the tide rises in the Straits of Magellan, and which would have rendered
itself apparent as but a persistent inward flowing of the sea. The depression, which, by extending
frankie
(Frankie)
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