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BOOK REVIEWS General and Miscellaneous Noah's Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought. By Norman Cohn. (New Haven:Yale University Press. 1996.Pp.xiv, 154. $25.00.) Norman Cohn,Astor-Wolfson Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex, has written an excellent, but all too brief, survey of the Flood Story and the history of its interpretation. An added bonus are fifty-five black and white illustrations and twenty lavish colorplates.This book will serve,I hope, as a wholesome warning that while fundamentalism, on the one extreme of interpretation, has failed in its approach to the Flood Story, modern psychoanalytic eisegesis, at the opposite extreme, fares no better. After outlining the flood stories in Mesopotamian literature, none of which have serious moral overtones, Cohn explains the distinctive features ofthe Genesis story. He then reviews early Christian aUegorical and typological interpretations .The Flood became, for some, a figure offire that would foUow at the end of time, with Noah as a symbol of faithful Christians who lived with the Last Judgment always in mind. The survival of Noah was also viewed as a type of Christ's resurrection. For Justin Martyr the wood oftheArk prefigured the cross on which Jesus saved mankind. In Augustine's thought the Ark symbolized the Church, the only means of salvation for believers. Even Jerome, the premier biblical scholar of the age, shared similar ideas. Much more hypothetical, as one would expect,were the rabbinic interpretations that supplied numerous details lacking in the original story. Since Genesis makes no mention of specific sins, the rabbis made up a few: Men mated with other men's wives and even with their own daughters as weU as with animals; animals also engaged in unnatural mating with other species. EquaUy fantastic were the descriptions of the shape and plan of the Ark. Cohn's history demonstrates the egregious error of supporting scientific theories by appealing to Genesis. From a study of the biblical chronologies,James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, concluded that God created heaven and earth on Sunday evening, October 23, 4004 b.c., and that the Flood began on Sunday, December 7, 2349 b.c., and the Ark landed on Mount Ararat on May 6 the following year.These dates were taken at 726 BOOK REVIEWS727 face value by most scientists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries . Cohn cites examples of scientists who quoted texts from Genesis to corroborate their hypotheses regarding the formation of fossils, mountains, seas, and land masses.These authors harmonized geological and paleontological data gleaned from scientific observation with the biblical time frame regarding the age ofthe earth and cosmos.A Swiss geologist,Jean-André de Luc (1727-1817), even concluded that Genesis describes precisely what geology has proved— only divine revelation can account for that. The "six days" of Genesis 1 are epochs of ^determinate length; the geological strata show the characteristics ofthese epochs.The Flood occurred at the end ofthe sixth epoch; hence, in relatively recenüy times. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists began to recognize that the earth had to be older than (the commonly accepted) 6,000 years;in fact, it is more like 4.5 billion years old. In 1840 Louis Agassiz proposed his theory of glaciation to account for current facts of geology.The ad hoc models of the "scriptural geologists" to reconcile earth science with Genesis began to crumble. As could be expected, however, attempts to date the earth by empirical methods (with no reference to the Bible) met with fierce hostility. Richard Kirwan (1733-1812), for instance, dogmatically rejected the high antiquity of the earth by insisting that such notions undermine society as well as religion and morality.Thus, Kirwan became a pioneer offundamentalism. The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by John C. Whitcomb,Jr., a professor of OldTestament, and Henry M. Morris, a professor of hydraulic engineering, was published in 1961 and remains in print.This book is the principal source of what is known as "creation science," essentially nothing more than fundamentalist doctrine in which the"Flood geology" I described above plays a leading role. Perhaps more...

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