cattle, and creeping thing and fowl of the heaven : they
^ere blotted out fh>m the earth, and Noah only was
left, and they that were with him in the ark. And
the waters prevailed on the earth a hundred and fifty
days." The waters of the Flood increased, for a pe- riod of 190 days (40+160, comparing vH, 12 and 24).
And then *' God remembered Noah," and made a wind
to pass over the earth, so that the waters were assuaged.
"^he ark rested on the seventeenth day of the seventh
The word specially used to designate the Flood of Noah (b^Slfih, ham-mabbtd') occurs in only one other passage of Scripture (Psa. xxix, 10). The poet there sings of the majesty of God as seen in the storm. It is not improbable that the heavy rain accompanying the thunder and lightning had been such as to swell the torrents, and perhaps cause a partial inundation. This carried back his thoughts to the great flood of which he had often read, and he sang, " Jehovah sat as king at the Flood," and looking up at the clear face of the sky, and on the freshness and glory of nature around him, he added, ** and Jehovah remaineth a king forever." In Isa. liv, 9, the Flood is spoken of as '* the waters of Noah. " God himself appeals to his promise made after the Flood as a pledge of his faithMness to Israel : " For this is as the waters of Noah unto me ; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee."
In the N. T. our Lord gives the sanction of his own
DELUGE
784
DELUGE
authority to the historical truth of the narrative, Matt, xxly, 87 (comp. Luke xvii, 26), declaring that the state of the world at his second coming shall be such as it was in the dajs of Koah. Peter speaks of the **long suffering of God,*' which " waited in the dajs ot Noah while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water," and sees in the wa- ters of the flood by which the ark was borne up a lype of baptism, by which the Church is separated firom die world. Again, in his second Epistle (ii, 6), he cites it as an instance of the righteous judgment (Mf Gk>d, who spared not the old world, etc.
II. TradiUons.— The legends of many nations have preserved the memory of a great and destructive flood ^m which but a small part of mankind escaped. It is not always very dear whether they point back to a common centre, whence they were carried by the dif- ferent fiamilies of men as they wandered east and west, or whether they were of national growth, and embody merely records of catastrophes, such as especially in mountainous countries are of no rare occurrence. In some instances, no doubt, the resemblances between the heathen and the Jewish stories are so striking as to render it morally certain that the former were bor- rowed firom the latter. We find, indeed, a mytholog- ical element, the absence of all moral purpose, and a national and local coloring, but, discernible among these, undoubted features of the primitive history.
The account of the Flood in the Koran \b apparently drawn partly from Biblical and partly from Persian sources. In the main, no doubt, it fellows the narra- tive in Genesis, but dweUs at length on the testimony of Noah to the unbelieving (Sale's J^ortm, chap, xi, p. 181). He is said to have tarried among his people one thousand save fifty years (chap, zxix, p. 827). The people scoffed at and derided him, and *'thu8 were they employed until our sentence was put in execu- tion and the oven poured forth water." Different ex- planations have been given of this oven, which may be seen in Sale's note. He suggests (after Hyde, De Bel. Peri.) that this idea was borrowed firom the Per- sian Magi, who also fancied that the first waters of the Deluge gushed out of the oven of a certain old wom- an named Zala Cidk, But the Uum&r (oven), he ob- serves, may mean only a receptacle in which waters are gathered, or the fissure firom which they broke forth. Another peculiarity of this version is, that Noah calls in vain to one of his sons to enter into the ark : he refuses, in the hope of escaping to a moun- tain, and is drowned before his father's eyes. The ark, moreover, is said to have rested on the mountain Al Ji^di, which Sale supposes should be written Jordi or Giordi, and connects with the Gordy»i, Cardn, etc. or Kurd Mountains on the borders of Armenia and Mesopotamia (ch. xi, p. 181-188, and notes). See Ar- arat.
1. The traditions which come nearest to the Bibli- cal account are those of the nations of Western Asia. Foremost among these is the Chaldean. It is pre- served in a Fragment of Berosus, and is as follows : '* After the death of Ardates, his son Xisuthrus reign- ed eighteen sari. In his time happened a great Del- uge, the history of which is thus described : The Deity Kronos appeared to him in a vision, and warned him that on the l&th day of the month Desius there would be a flood by which mankind would be destroyed. He therefore enjoined him to write a history of the begin- ning, course, and end of all things, and to bury it in the City of the Sun at Sippara ; and to build a vessel ((TKa^oc), and to take with him into it his fHends and relatives ; and to put on board food and drink, togeth*- er with different animals, birds, and quadrupeds ; and as soon as he had made all arrangements, to commit himself to the deep. Having asked the Deity whither he was to sail, he was answered, * To the gods, after having offered a prayer for the good of mankind.'