The only authority for the Noachian deluge assures us that,
before it visited the earth, Cain had built cities; Jubal had
invented harps and organs; while mankind had advanced so far
beyond the neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage that Tubal-cain
was a worker in iron. Therefore, if the Noachian legend is to be
taken for the history of an event which happened in the glacial
epoch, we must revise our notions of pleistocene civilisation.
On the other hand, if the Pentateuchal story only means
something quite different, that happened somewhere else,
thousands of years earlier, dressed up, what becomes of its
credit as history? I wonder what would be said to a modern
historian who asserted that Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and
then tried to justify the assertion by adducing evidence of the
Great Fire of London in 1666. Yet the attempt to save the credit
of the Noachian story by reference to something which is
supposed to have happened in the far north, in the glacial
epoch, is far more preposterous.
Moreover, these dust-raising dialecticians ignore some of the
most important and well-known facts which bear upon the
question. Anything more than a parochial acquaintance with
physical geography and geology would suffice to remind its
possessor that the Holy Land itself offers a standing protest
against bringing such a deluge as that of Noah anywhere near it,
either in historical times or in the course of that pleistocene
period, of which the "great ice age" formed a part.
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