Flood Legends: Global Clues of a Common Event

The story of the Deluge - or the Global Flood - permeates nearly every culture in the world in some way, shape, or form. While details vary between the different cultural versions, the same basic plot line occurs in all versions: a god becomes angry, destroys the earth with a Flood, but preserves the human race by selecting a handful of people to save. These people survive the Flood by building a vessel. It is this same group of people that are then responsible for repopulating the earth.

Despite the striking similarities, some mythologists have looked at the minor differences in the stories and declared: "This never happened!" The differences, they claim, are too great, and the premise is too far-fetched. There is another alternative, and that is to accept that the different versions all refer to the same event. In other words, if we can accept that there was a group of people that survived a Global Deluge, and that the story of the event was passed on from generation to generation, through various developing cultures, then we would expect: 1) a similar, if not identical plot with 2) diverging details.

This would be the process of one story being told many different ways, a concept at the heart of Flood Legends - Global Clues of a Common Event.