The Timeline of Noah’s Flood (Video)

When I first wrote about Noah’s flood some years ago, I offered an interpretation of the flood timeline based primarily on a 1980 paper by Niels Peter Lemche. Later, I discovered a more recent paper by Lloyd M. Barré that solved some of the difficulties that remained in the reconstructions attempted by Lemche and others.

Anyone can read the paper for themselves of course, but I thought it would be nice to demonstrate the flood chronology visually as a follow-up video to Episode 1, which I posted two weeks ago. Shorter videos like this will be treated as supplementary instead of getting their own episode number.

Announcing a New Video Project

My media consumption increasingly comes in the form of YouTube videos these days — particularly documentary-style video essays on a variety of topics that interest me. One of my primary interests is obviously biblical studies, but there aren’t a lot of video channels that take biblical research seriously and communicate it to general audiences. So I decided I would give it a try.

Noah’s Flood: Competing Visions of a Mesopotamian Tradition

December of 1872 marked a watershed in biblical studies. At a highly publicized lecture for the Society for Biblical Archaeology, with British Prime Minister William Gladstone in attendance, an Assyriologist named George Smith revealed the startling contents of a tablet he had recently discovered. The tablet, one of 25,000 or so that had been excavated from the ruins of ancient Nineveh and sent back to the British Museum in London, told the story of a universal flood that sounded very much like the tale of Noah’s Ark that every churchgoer is familiar with. The tablet turned out to be one of twelve that made up the now-famous Gilgamesh Epic.