Truth Among The Fiction

A decade ago, Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pittman proposed an arresting explanation of the story of Noah's flood:

Eight thousand years ago, what is now the Black Sea was a freshwater lake, much smaller and much shallower than today's inland ocean. Early farming communities grew up on the shores of this lake.

As they planted and reaped, however, these early farmers faced environmental disaster. The ice age had ended. The great glaciers that had once covered Europe and Russia were melting. It was the runoff from these glaciers that had filled the Black Sea with fresh water. But now that same runoff was raising ocean levels worldwide. As the Mediterranean rose, the land barrier between the Med and the Black Sea shrank. Until one day, about 5600 BC, the waters of the Mediterranean overtopped this last barrier, and--well, here is what Ryan and Pittman hypothesize happened next:

"Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, 200 times what flows over Niagara Falls. The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least 300 days."

According to Ryan and Pittman, 60,000 square miles of land were inundated by waters rising perhaps 20 feet per day. Villages and farms would have been irretrievably ruined, their inhabitants left to wander as refugees.

Ryan's and Pittman's thesis has been confirmed by some archaeological evidence, including traces of primordial shoreline, freshwater snails and submerged river deltas 300 feet under the present surface of the Black Sea.

For biblical literalists, this archaeology offers no comfort. The flood did not cover the whole world; it did not extinguish all life; and it seems very unlikely that anybody would build a huge wooden boat to escape a flood that could be escaped by walking.

On the other hand, Ryan's and Pittman's work does suggest that the story of Noah preserves the memory of something real, an actual event that genuinely reshaped human civilization. From such work, and work like it, there is real inspiration to be drawn by those of us who want to adapt religious faith to modern times.

Very few of the stories of the Bible can be taken as literally true. If, for example, the kingdom of Egypt had been wracked by 10 terrible disasters followed by the exodus of thousands of freed Hebrew slaves, you would think that somewhere some Egyptian chronicle would have alluded to the fact. Yet no Egyptian source yet discovered ever drops a hint that anything like the Exodus ever occurred.

There is no extra-Biblical evidence for the existence of David and Solomon, a remarkable omission for rulers of a mighty Near Eastern empire. By contrast, we have a very good working chronology of the list of Hittite kings stretching back as far as 1430 BC.

The Christian Bible faces equally severe problems. The plot device that Luke uses to shift the birthplace of Jesus from Nazareth to Bethlehem is very dodgy. (The Romans do seem to have carried out a census in Palestine, but the earliest possible date for that census is at least a decade after the birth of Jesus, and there is no way that the practical Romans would ever have ordered millions of Jews to return to their ancestral villages, when they could be taxed just as well by leaving them where they were.)

And yet, for all these doubts, there remains some germ of truth. Semitic tribesmen did wander into and out of ancient Egypt. There was a great Hebrew kingdom based on Jerusalem. Pontius Pilate did govern Judea, Roman censuses were carried out, and it is hard to imagine that Jesus did not exist to inspire his followers to believe him the prophesied Messiah.

How should modern-minded people reconcile their knowledge and their faith? Each of us will arrive at our own answers. To my way of thinking, at least, wisdom begins with rethinking how holy books were meant to be read. I don't have to accept the literal accuracy of the Book of Kings to be taught by the prophets who upbraided those kings.

The Bible is the work of ancient people who thought about the world and its history very differently from the way we moderns do. They taught lessons, not facts. Of course, we must test their lessons against our own conceptions of morality and justice. If a religion justifies cruelty and violence, then we do not need to consult the archaeological record to say that religion is false. And when we encounter truth and beauty and meaning in an ancient text, it is no refutation of that text to observe that it deviates from the archaeological record. The truths that should guide our lives are not written on potsherds or buried under dust.