This objection assumes that the narrative of the flood of Noah in the Quran is the same as the narrative in the Bible. That is a false assumption. The Quran does not replicate any Biblical story verbatim. The Biblical stories have been altered by the hands of men, and it is these alterations that lead to contradictions such as those mentioned in the question. Whenever the Quran relates a Biblical story, it contains corrections, additions, and omissions that re-align it with modern scientific and historical knowledge (often miraculously, as I describe in The Miracle of the Pharaoh in the Quran).by HAMZA KARAMALI
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Was Noah's Flood Global or Local? - Basira Education
***I am not sure whether there is any archeological evidence, but it is unlikely to have archeological evidence if the flood is a local flood. As you are Muslim, I will focus on the Quran. In the Quran, there is no conclusive evidence that the flood was global.
The Quranic stories always followed the same pattern: A prophet was sent for a qawm (=nation) and that nation was destroyed for rejecting the prophet. Story of Noah was always compared with story of Aad, Thamud etc in many verses where always a local area was destroyed (11:89, 38:12, 40:31, 50:12 14:9, 22:42). It was never mentioned that the story of Noah was different and the whole mankind ("naas") was destroyed, rather only his qawm (=nation) was destroyed (51:44–46). Note that, there is no change in “sunnat Allah” or way of God.
Such is God's way which is ongoing. You will never find any change in God's way. (Quran 48:23)
The description of the flood we find from the Quran is described below (Quran 11:38-48)
- Prophet Noah made an Ark (11:38).
- He took domestic animals with him (11:40). Many commentators of Quran adopted popular Judio-Christian description and said that prophet Noah took one pair of all animals. But, this is NOT the understanding of all commentators. The word "kulli" means ALL, but it also means EACH. The word used for "pair" is in dual form (“zawjayn”). Thus, the verse says: "Noah took EACH kind/sex within the pair" NOT "He took a pair of ALL animals" (This is the interpretation of Imam Razi). This is what you do during a local flood. You take a pair of animals available in your area, and you make sure that within the pair each sex is included (that means you don't take 2 males or 2 females, but you take 1 male and 1 female).
- Then water came in big waves, like a mountain (11:42). Here, it doesn’t mean that the wave had the same size of mountain, but it is only a way of expression. For example in 42:32, ships are compared with mountain and in 24:43, clouds are compared with mountain. These verses are not saying that ships or clouds have the same height of mountain, but indicates that these are huge. So the verse 11:42 is basically saying that, huge waves of water came.
- The flood covered the "ard". In the Quran, the word "ard" often means ground or land, not always the full globe. One example of this is: "Roman empire has been defeated in the nearest "ard" (30:2-3). Definitely, they were not defeated in the whole world. You will find such usage of the word "ard" as local land or just the ground in many other verses (7:110, 7:137, 12:9, 12:80, 14:13, 20:57 and many other).
- Noah’s son told that he would escape by climbing a mountain, but he was drowned (11:43). But the Quran doesn't give any such description that he was above mountain and water covered him. It just says that water came BETWEEN Noah and his son, and his son was drowned. Thus, you can't assume the height of the water from this verse either.
- Then it was said, "O ard (=ground) swallow the water and O samaa (=sky) withhold the water (=rain) (11:44).” Thus, the flood stopped. And the Ark rested on Judi. Though Quran doesn't specifically say that Judi is a mountain, but it is understood this way. Even if we assume that Judi is a mountain, Quran doesn’t give any description, height and exact part of Judi where the ark rested.
- Prophet Noah was then said to "go down", not necessarily from a very high place to a low place BUT one place to another place, as the same word was used to command Moses to travel from one place to another (2:61)
Thus, Quran doesn’t have any description of the flood being global though our minds deceive us as our minds are already preoccupied with descriptions from other sources and many commentators fell in this trap. Their descriptions are also full of extra Quranic unnecessary detail that they used in attempt to paint the whole picture, that doesn’t mean that Quran confirms those.
The story of Noah in the Bible is not same as the Quran.
Quran portraits prophet Noah as an ordinary human with no quality that differs from his contemporary people. Thus his age was no way part of his miracle. The saying of people around him indicate that they must have also lived long time if prophet Noah did so.
But the great ones among his people, who refused to acknowledge the truth, answered: We do not see in thee anything but a mortal man like ourselves and we do not see that any follow thee save those who are quite obviously the most abject among us and we do not see that you could be in any way superior to us: on the contrary, we think that you are liars! (Quran 11:27).
From the Bible we know that prophet Noah lived 600 years before flood+350 years after flood=950 years. Quran doesn’t give any exact year but says that he had lived 1000 years except 50 years before the flood came. From these two accounts, Muslim exegesises extracted that he had lived 950+ years since he also lived for years after the flood (Ibn Kathir says: he lived 60 more years after the flood).
Now, if we look at Quranic narrative we see two different words are used to describe his life span.
We sent forth Noah unto his people, and he dwelt among them a thousand years (“sanatin”) bar fifty years (“aama”) and then the floods over-whelmed them while they were still lost in evildoing: (Quran 29:14)
God could have used same word but he used two different words, both of which means “year”. We cannot do simple subtraction when units are different. For example, we can substract 50 apples from 1000 apples but we cant substract 50 apples from 1000 oranges. When God used two different units we just can't overlook it.
Ibn Faris says the real meaning of sanah is dependent on a period of time. It can be defined by the circular motion of the moon or the sun. Some says: “aam” is the period without hardships (fruitfulness) and “sanah” is the period when there were hardships (drought). But we can try to look how does Quran describe these two words.
- “Sanah” in the Quran not always mean definite time. For example, Quran 2:96 talks about greedy people each of them want to live one thousand year (“alfa sanatin”) which definitely doesn’t mean a specific 1000 year time but a very long time (otherwise there is no reason to think that they will not want to live more than 1000 years). Another verse 32:5 says that our 1 day is equivalent to God's 1000 years. Such rounded 1000 is used in other verses too (such as in 8:9, 97:3 etc). It is similar to “yawm”, which doesn’t mean fixed 24 hour (day), but a long period of time. Thus, world was created in 6 period of time, not in exact 6 days .
- On the other hand “aam" is used for more definite one year or to denote something that happens annually (Quran 9:26, 37,126, 12:48, 31:14).
Thus by combining these two we can only be definite that prophet Noah lived a very long indefinite amount of time with hardship and then later 50 years in ease, if we focus on Quranic account only.
People have tried to calculate prophet Noah's age based on the fact that Sumerian history shows that they recorded impossibly long life span for their kings
since they had a different counting system for year. But, I am not sure whether this is wise to use Sumerian calculation system to understand Quranic verse. Some people has lowered prophet Noah’s age as short as to 71 years based on that (search for the youtube video if you are interested)! Other says, prophet Noah lived 83.33 years based on 1 sanah=1 lunar month. Lane's dictionary says that “Sanah" also means crop that can be harvested 4 times a year. Based on that some accounts say that prophet Noah lived for around 250 years (1000÷4). (Source: Lughat-ul-Quran). It is similar to prophet Joseph's dream interpretation where he said to save from the seven good harvests for the upcoming famine (Quran 12:46–47). Here by “Sanah” he meant 7 crop cycle not exact 7 year (since all crops don't give annual harvest).However, these all are conjectures. When people highly criticize holy books saying that there is no scientific evidence that people lived so long in past we can just say that, “We know that prophet Noah lived for very long time, but we don't know how long was it according to the modern year calculation system”.
And surely the God knows best!
Footnotes
A provocative theory proposed in 1997 that water levels in “Black Lake” were 80 meters lower than today. When the Aegean and Black Seas were reconnected 9,400 years ago, the resulting would have drowned about 70,000 square kilometers. New evidence indicates that the lake’s water level was only 30 meters lower than today, and so the flood inundated only about 2,000 square kilometers. (Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
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Noah's Not-so-big Flood
***Regional Evidence for the Noachian and Similar Floods
Two rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris flow through Mesopotamia, which is now the country of Iraq (Figure 1). There are several layers in exposed rocks near these two rivers in southeastern Mesopotamia (Iraq) that are likely flood deposits. Most are about a foot (0.3 m) thick, but one is as much as 3 meters thick (MacDonald 1988). Flood debris from this same thick deposit along the Euphrates River near the ancient Sumerian city of Shuruppak about 200 km southeast of Baghdad has been dated by the C
Figure 1. Map of Mesopotamia (Iraq).
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Using Computational Geophysics to Understand the Genesis Flood Cataclysm
Image to right: Circulation patterns in the North Atlantic Ocean. Cold, dense water is shown in blue, flowing south from upper latitudes, while warm, less dense water flows north. Click image to enlarge. Credit: Jack Cook for Ocean and Climate Change Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.This work is the first to consistently recreate the event by computer modeling, and the first time that the model results have been confirmed by comparison to the climate record, which includes such things as ice core and tree ring data.
"We only have one example of how the climate reacts to changes, the past," said Gavin A. Schmidt, a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, researcher and co-author on the study. "If we're going to accurately simulate the Earth's future, we need to be able to replicate past events. This was a real test of the model's skill."
The study was led by Allegra LeGrande, a graduate student in the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. The results appeared in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" (PNAS) in Jan. 2006.
The group used an atmosphere-ocean coupled climate computer model known as "GISS Model E-R" to simulate the climate impact of a massive freshwater flood into the North Atlantic that happened about 8,200 years ago after the end of the last Ice Age. Retreating glaciers opened a route for two ancient meltwater lakes, known as Agassiz and Ojibway, to suddenly and catastrophically drain from the middle of the North American continent.
Image above: This is a GISS Model simulation of the 8,200 year climate response to freshwater entering into the Hudson Bay. Panels (a) and (b) show the model's simulated changes in surface air temperature and precipitation, respectively. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA GISS
At approximately the same time, climate records show that the Earth experienced its last abrupt climate shift. Scientists believe that the massive freshwater pulse interfered with the ocean's overturning circulation, which distributes heat around the globe. According to the record of what are known as "climate proxies", average air temperatures apparently fell as much as several degrees in some areas of the Northern Hemisphere.
Climate researchers use these proxies, chemical signals locked in minerals and ice bubbles as well as pollen and other biological indicators, as indirect measures of temperature and precipitation patterns in the distant past. Because GISS Model E-R incorporates the response of these proxies in its output, the authors of the PNAS study were able to compare their results directly to the historical record.
The researchers prodded their model with a freshwater flow equal to between 25 and 50 times the flow of the Amazon River in 12 model runs that took more than a year to complete. Although the simulations largely agreed with records from North Atlantic sediment cores and Greenland ice cores, the team's results showed that the flood had much milder effects around the globe than many people thought.
According to the model, temperatures in the North Atlantic and Greenland showed the largest decrease, with slightly less cooling over parts of North America and Europe. The rest of the northern hemisphere, however, showed very little effect, and temperatures in the southern hemisphere remained largely unchanged. Moreover, ocean circulation, which initially dropped by half after simulated flood, appeared to rebound within 50 to 150 years.
"The flood we looked at was even larger than anything that could happen today," said LeGrande. "Still, it's important for us to study because the real thing occurred during a period when conditions were not that much different from the present day."
The GISS climate model is also being used for the latest simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to simulate the Earth's present and future climate. "Hopefully, successful simulations of the past such as this will increase confidence in the validity of model projections," said Schmidt.
The study was funded by NASA, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.
Footprints and sand ‘dunes’ in a Grand Canyon sandstone!
Anyone who has stood on the rim and looked down into Grand Canyon would readily echo these words as one’s breath is taken away with the sheer magnitude of the spectacle. The Canyon stretches for 446 km (277 miles) through northern Arizona, attains a depth of more than 1.6 km (1 mile), and ranges from 6.4 km (4 miles) to 29 km (18 miles) in width. In the walls of the Canyon can be seen flat-lying rock layers that were once sand, mud or lime. Now hardened, they look like pages of a giant book as they stretch uniformly right through the Canyon and underneath the plateau country to the north and south and deeper to the east.
The Coconino Sandstone
To begin to comprehend the awesome scale of these rock layers, we can choose any one for detailed examination. Perhaps the easiest of these rock layers to spot, since it readily catches the eye, is a thick, pale buff coloured to almost white sandstone near the top of the Canyon walls. Geologists have given the different rock layers names, and this one is called the Coconino Sandstone (see Figures 1 and 2). It is estimated to have an average thickness of 96 m (315 ft) and, with equivalent sandstones to the east, covers an area of about 519,000 sq km (200,000 sq miles).2 That is an area more than twice the size of the Australian State of Victoria, or almost twice the area of the US State of Colorado! Thus the volume of this sandstone is conservatively estimated at 41,700 cu km (10,000 cu miles). That’s a lot of sand!
What do these rock layers in Grand Canyon mean? What do they tell us about the earth’s past? For example, how did all the sand in this Coconino Sandstone layer and its equivalents get to where it is today?
To answer these questions geologists study the features within rock layers like the Coconino Sandstone, and even the sand grains themselves. An easily noticed feature of the Coconino Sandstone is the distinct cross layers of sand within it called cross beds (see Figure 3).
For many years evolutionary geologists have interpreted these cross beds by comparing them with currently forming sand deposits — the sand dunes in deserts which are dominated by sand grains made up of the mineral quartz, and which have inclined internal sand beds. Thus it has been proposed that the Coconino Sandstone accumulated over thousands and thousands of years in an immense windy desert by migrating sand dunes, the cross beds forming on the down-wind sides of the dunes as sand was deposited there.3
The Coconino Sandstone is also noted for the large number of fossilized footprints, usually in sequences called trackways. These appear to have been made by four-footed vertebrates moving across the original sand surfaces (see Figure 4). These fossil footprint trackways were compared to the tracks made by reptiles on desert sand dunes,4 so it was then assumed that these fossilized footprints in the Coconino Sandstone must have been made in dry desert sands which were then covered up by wind-blown sand, subsequent cementation forming the sandstone and fossilizing the prints.
Yet another feature that evolutionary geologists have used to argue that the Coconino Sandstone represents the remains of a long period of dry desert conditions is the sand grains themselves. Geologists have studied the sand grains from modern desert dunes and under the microscope they often show pitted or frosted surfaces. Similar grain surface textures have also been observed in sandstone layers containing very thick cross beds such as the Coconino Sandstone, so again this comparison has strengthened the belief that the Coconino Sandstone was deposited as dunes in a desert.
At first glance this interpretation would appear to be an embarrassment to Bible-believing geologists who are unanimous in their belief that it must have been Noah’s Flood that deposited the flat lying beds of what were once sand, mud and lime, but are now exposed as the rock layers in the walls of the Canyon.
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