by Keith Cantrell

Created on: March 08, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

The first thing we need to realize about the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is that it wasn't written in English. What we call "The Old Testament" was written in an ancient form of Hebrew. Something is always lost in translation and so modern readers will never be able to get a perfect interpretation of what the original writers actually meant. For instance, the measurements of Noah's Ark are given in modern translations of the Bible in feet and inches. These are only approximate. Keep these facts in mind as you read this fascinating article.

Fundamentalists consider the story of Noah and the Flood to be quite literal, but most other people, including scholars and academics recognize it as only an ancient myth. One reason for this is because at least two other ancient myths from the Middle East exist which describe a giant flood. One is the Epic of Gilgamesh and the other is the story of Ziusudra who also builds an ark. The word "ark" simply means "box." One translator even called it a barge which is probably more accurate because of all the cargo it had to hold. Be that as it may these stories describe a similar cataclysmic event that happened 7000 - 8000 years ago in the Middle East.

This is where modern technology enters the picture. Two geophysicists named William Ryan and Walter Pitman have discovered evidence of a giant flood of epic proportions that happened about 7600 years ago in the region known today as the Black Sea. They speculated that an ancient shoreline existed under the current sea level. Using sound waves and coring devices they probed the sea floor and eventually discovered evidence that the Black Sea had once been a vast freshwater lake lying hundreds of feet below the level of the world's rising oceans.

Briefly, the theory of Ryan and Pitman is that the Black Sea was once isolated from the Mediterranean by a narrow strip of land and that the level of the Mediterranean was much lower than it is today because of the last Ice Age. That meant that the Black Sea was below "sea level." When the world's oceans began rising because the icecaps were melting there would have been many places where ocean water encroached on dry land and filled previously empty basins or enlarged freshwater lakes by breaching natural dikes and other narrow strips of land. This is probably what happened in the Black Sea. As the Mediterranean continued to rise it eventually flowed over the top of the narrow isthmus separating the two bodies of water and created a

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