Flood Stories in Every Nation

Ask people all over the world for their oldest stories and one keeps coming back: a great flood, a warning, a boat, a few survivors, animals, and often a bird sent out to find land.

Babylon has one, in the Gilgamesh epic. The Greeks had one. China has flood traditions in its oldest records. There are versions among peoples in India, in Africa, across the Pacific islands, and among many Native American nations — peoples who had never met one another, on continents separated by oceans.

If Genesis 10 is true and every nation on earth descends from three brothers who lived through a flood, that is precisely what we should expect. The memory would travel with the families when they scattered, and it would be told and retold in every language.

*Now the careful part.* You will sometimes see a very large number quoted — "over 500 flood legends." Treat that with care. The counts vary a great deal depending on who is counting and how loosely a story counts as a flood story, and some old collections were not carefully done. And there is a reasonable objection: floods are common events, and stories can spread by contact between peoples.

So say what is solid, and it is plenty: *flood traditions are strikingly widespread, and the common details are hard to explain by accident.* That is exactly what the Bible's history predicts.