Everyone is pretty much familiar with the flood story from Genesis with Noah and his ark, but did you know the Bible isn’t the only text to have a flood myth within its pages? There are flood myths from ancient Greece, Persia, India, even as far as Scandinavia and South America. How do I know this? Because I have read Before the Flood.
Ian Wilson takes a step into the ancient and prehistoric with this book, delving into the past no one is quite sure about; where historical fact begins to blur and fictional theory sharpens. Wilson has done plenty of research (the lengthy bibliography vouches for this) into the many different flood myths scattered across the world to write this unique book, where they all come together. He presents it in a logical manner, also revealing some contemporary flood myths that were perpetuated by ignorant scientists.
What is important is that Wilson treats the flood as a real event that happened, which is not surprising, since there are all these stories about it. But he backs all his ideas and premises with scientific research that make them more believable. Back when Genesis was written, there was no technology to validate the flood, but now Wilson has proven we are at a time to accept that a catastrophic flood of some sort did occur some ten thousand years ago.
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Originally published on March 17th, 2003 ©Alex C. Telander.
Originally published in the Long Beach Union.
The Bibilical flood was a real event but it was not a global event. Given that Biblical time lines say it happen around 2300 BC, if it had been global then all of the ancient flood stories from other civilizations would have been lost. Many areas had floods. The area that Noah lived in had a flood. But none of the floods were global.