101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #35:
The flood occurred in the tenth generation of humanity.
The Myth: And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was
upon the earth. (Gen. 7:6)
The Reality: In order to conform to Babylonian traditions, biblical redactors moved
the flood story from the first day of Creation to the tenth generation of humanity.
Genesis places Noah in the tenth generation from Adam and places the flood in
Noah’s six hundredth year. From Genesis chronology (in the Masoretic text), we
know that the flood occurred 1,656 years after the birth of Adam, but due to inconsistencies
and contradictions in biblical data concerning the date of the Exodus (see
Myth #72), we can’t determine the precise year in which Adam was created. Within
the accepted parameters, though, we can date his appearance to somewhere between
4004 B.C. and 3761 B.C. The latter date comes from Jewish traditions while the former
derives from the calculations of the seventeenth century Bishop Ussher. Other
informed estimates have given us a flood date between 2348 B.C. and 2105 B.C., a
thoroughly implausible timeframe.
Egypt’s First Dynasty dates to about 3,100 B.C. and we have a large enough body
of Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean archaeological evidence to know that
no worldwide (or at least major Near Eastern) flood happened after the start of
Egypt’s First Dynasty. So, on archaeological evidence alone, the biblical flood couldn’t
have occurred at any of the times indicated for Noah.
Since the Bible also tells us that Moses grew up as an adopted child of the royal
family, he would have received a first-class Egyptian education and would have known
about Egypt’s history from the First Dynasty down to his own time. If he believed in
any major flood, he would have placed it well before Egypt’s First Dynasty, not in the
time of Noah.
As we saw in Myths #32–#33, the story of Noah’s flood originated with the Hermopolitan
Creation myth and should have occurred before the appearance of human-
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