I felt like it looked like I was being evasive... so here... is tidbit about what I am referencing..
note.. I did not even read the rest of this site... and I have no idea... whether it supports the the bible or not.
https://biologos.org/questions/genesis-flood
A Local Flood
The language used in Genesis 6-9 does not insist that the flood was global.
First of all, the Hebrew
kol erets, meaning whole Earth, can also be translated whole land in reference to local, not global, geography. The Old Testament scholar Gleason L. Archer explains that the Hebrew word
erets is often translated as Earth in English translations of the Bible, when in reality it is also the word for land, as in the land of Israel.6 Archer explains that erets is used many times throughout the Old Testament to mean land and country. Furthermore, the term
tebel, which translates to the whole expanse of the Earth, or the Earth as a whole, is not used in
Genesis 6:17, nor in subsequent verses in
Genesis 7 (7:4, 7:10, 7:17, 7:18, 7:19).7 If the intent of this passage was to indicate the entire expanse of the Earth,
tebel would have been the more appropriate word choice. Consequently, the Hebrew text is more consistent with a local geography for the flood.
Moreover, in this period of history, people understood the whole Earth as a smaller geographical area. There is no evidence to suggest that people of this time had explored the far reaches of the globe or had any understanding of its scope. For example, the Babylonian Map of the World,8 the oldest known world map, depicts the world as two concentric circles containing sites of Assyria, Babylon, Bit Yakin, Urartu, a few other cities and geographic features all surrounded by ocean. There are also small, simple triangles that shoot out from the ocean labeled as
nagu or uncharted regions.9 Contextual evidence also suggests that Greek geographers developed comparable maps during the middle of the first millennium, where Greece was positioned in the middle of a circle surrounded by oceans.10 These maps remind us that people were most familiar with the regions surrounding their homelands. Therefore, to say that something happened in the
kol erets –– or referring to "all people" (
Genesis 6:13), –– would have been an appropriate way of referring to the entirety of Earth and its population in a manner in which ancient Israelites would have been familiar. Davis A. Young, author of
The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church's Response to Extrabiblical Evidence, sums this up when he states:
"Given the frequency with which the Bible uses universal language to describe local events of great significance, such as the famine or the plagues in Egypt, is it unreasonable to suppose that the flood account uses hyperbolic language to describe an event that devastated or disrupted Mesopotamian civilization — that is to say, the whole world of the Semites?" 11
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