Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel

The CES Letter treats one particular reading of the Flood — a young-earth, whole-planet inundation dated to roughly 2300 BCE — as if it were binding Latter-day Saint doctrine. It is not, and it never has been. The stronger, better-documented reading was already in print long before 2013.

The Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

“A global flood approximately 4,500 years ago would have wiped out all human civilizations — yet Egyptian, Chinese, and Mesopotamian civilizations show continuous, uninterrupted records across this period. There is no geological evidence for a global flood. The Tower of Babel has no archaeological support, and animal diversity on separate continents cannot be explained by a single ark.”

Every factual sentence here is essentially correct. Geology records no worldwide flood layer. Egyptian written records run through the third millennium BCE, and the archaeological cultures of China show unbroken continuity across the same span. Kangaroos and koalas live only in Australasia, lemurs only in Madagascar, and no reed boat gathered them. These are not the weak points of the argument — they are the strong points, and an honest response does not pretend otherwise.

The weak point is the hidden premise: that Latter-day Saint faith stands or falls with a hyper-literal reading the Church has never canonized. That premise is where Jeremy chose the easier target.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

On the Flood, two readings were available to any careful writer in 2013, and both were already in print.

The path Jeremy took — the folk-literalist reading: Genesis and Latter-day Saint scripture demand that the entire physical globe was submerged within human memory, every land animal descended from a single boatload, and every civilization was annihilated and restarted around 2300 BCE. Because science flatly refutes that, the scriptures must be false.

The path he passed over — the contextual reading: The Flood account is a covenant narrative told in the idiom and geography of the ancient Near East. Its Hebrew describes a catastrophe engulfing “all the land” known to its people; its purpose is theological, not a species inventory; and the Church has issued no official position fixing the event’s geographic extent, the earth’s age, or the mechanism of the Flood.

The contextual reading is better supported on every axis that matters. It is more faithful to the Hebrew, which is what the text actually says. It is more consistent with the sciences, which the folk reading cannot survive. And it is more honest about Latter-day Saint teaching, because the Church has repeatedly declined to bind members to a scientific model of earth history — the same restraint it shows on the age of the earth and on evolution and human origins. A responder engaging the strongest, most defensible form of Latter-day Saint belief would have addressed that reading. Jeremy addressed the weaker one and declared victory over it.

Response

1. “All the earth” Meant Something Narrower Than the Globe

The Hebrew phrase behind “all the earth” is kol ha’aretz, and eretz means both “earth” and, far more often, “land” or “country.” The Bible itself supplies the control case: during the Egyptian famine, “all the earth came into Egypt… to buy corn” (Genesis 41:57). No one imagines Aztecs and Aboriginal Australians queuing at Joseph’s granaries. The same idiom, in the same book, means “all the land within the horizon of the story.” Reading the identical phrase in Genesis 7 as a claim about the planet is a choice the text does not force.

Hugh Nibley, the most prolific Latter-day Saint scholar of the twentieth century, argued for exactly this: a real, catastrophic, but geographically bounded flood on the Mesopotamian plain, where waters covering “all the high hills” (Genesis 7:19) describe a genuine disaster within a specific land. This is not a modern retreat under scientific fire — it is an ancient-context reading with deep roots in the scholarship, and it long predates the CES Letter. Approaching Genesis this way, as literature written by and for a particular people in a particular world, is the same disciplined method that makes sense of the Old Testament as a whole.

The parallels between Genesis 6–9 and the Mesopotamian flood epics — the vessel, the birds sent to find land, the sacrifice on disembarking — point to a shared cultural memory of a massive regional flood in the ancient Near East, remembered by several peoples. That memory is real. What it is not is a geological record of a submerged planet.

2. The Strongest Version: Doesn’t Latter-day Saint Teaching Insist on a Global Flood?

Here is the objection the original response skated past — and the only version worth taking seriously. A sharp reader will say: “Fine, Genesis is flexible. But Latter-day Saint sources are not. The Flood was called the ‘baptism of the earth,’ and respected leaders such as Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie taught a literal, worldwide flood. Isn’t that binding doctrine?”

Two things are true at once, and both must be held honestly. First, the “baptism of the earth” image is a beautiful piece of Latter-day Saint devotional teaching: the earth is spoken of as a living thing that is born, baptized by water, and will one day be renewed by fire and receive its celestial glory. It is symbolic theology about the earth’s destiny — not a survey of Pleistocene sediment. A symbol of cleansing and rebirth tells you what the Flood means; it does not measure how many feet of water stood over Ararat.

Second, the leaders who taught a strictly literal global flood were faithful men administering a divine calling while also holding the scientific assumptions common in their generation. Latter-day Saints honor their prophetic office without treating every published opinion as canon — a distinction the Church draws for itself. Only four things carry binding doctrinal weight: the standard works and what the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve issue officially and in unity. Personal books like Mormon Doctrine and Man: His Origin and Destiny were never in that category; they carried no official imprimatur, and Church leadership pointedly declined to make them official. To read one apostle’s cosmology as the Church’s scientific creed is to misunderstand how Latter-day Saints define doctrine in the first place.

So the strongest form of the objection dissolves — not by denying that some leaders believed in a global flood (they did), but by recognizing that a sincerely held personal view is not a canonized commitment. What the Church actually asks members to accept is that Noah was a real prophet and that the covenant God made with him was real. Neither claim is touched by geology.

3. Uninterrupted Civilizations: The Argument Lands on the Wrong Target

Egyptian and Chinese records really do run continuously through the third millennium BCE, which really would be impossible if every human on earth had drowned around 2300 BCE. That is a decisive refutation — of young-earth global-flood creationism. But notice where the date itself comes from: it is calculated by adding up the biblical genealogies in the manner of Archbishop Ussher. Latter-day Saints are not bound to Ussher’s chronology any more than to his conclusions. Once the fixed 2300 BCE peg and the global scope are recognized as folk assumptions rather than doctrine, the continuous records of Egypt and China are exactly what a bounded, regional flood predicts. Civilizations outside the flooded land carried on undisturbed — because they were outside it.

The CES Letter’s cannonball is fired at a fortress the Church never built.

4. Animal Diversity: A Modern Literalism the Ancient Text Never Claimed

The image of every species on every continent — kangaroos, penguins, sloths, and all — marching aboard one vessel and later redistributing themselves across oceans is a post-Enlightenment literalism that the ancient audience would not have recognized. Their world was the inhabited land they knew; “the animals” were the beasts of that land, the covenant-relevant creatures of the story. Reading the Ark as a global zoological census, and then faulting it for failing as one, is a category error the text never invited.

A Latter-day Saint is under no obligation to explain marsupial biogeography from Genesis 8. The distribution of life across continents is the domain of biology and plate tectonics — and Latter-day Saint thought has long left such questions to the sciences, the same posture it takes toward the fossil record and the reality of death in the animal world long before Adam.

5. The Tower of Babel: A Real Phenomenon and Real Monuments

The Babel account explains something genuinely real: humanity speaks thousands of mutually unintelligible languages that fan out from common ancestors and drift apart over time. Whether Genesis compresses that long process into a single symbolic moment, or narrates a specific miraculous confounding, is not a question the Church has ever officially settled. The theological claim — that God works in and through the scattering of peoples — does not hang on excavating one tower.

It is also not true that Babel “has no archaeological support.” Monumental stepped temple-towers — ziggurats — are documented across ancient Mesopotamia, and the great ziggurat of Babylon, Etemenanki (“the foundation of heaven and earth”), is well attested in the ancient sources. The narrative plainly preserves the memory of these towering brick structures. And the Book of Mormon anchors its own Babel tradition in the record of the Jaredites, who came “from the great tower” at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people (Ether 1:33). What that requires is that God preserved a family through a moment of linguistic upheaval — not a specific coordinate in Babylon.

6. Why the Church Leaves These Questions Open

This is the pattern the CES Letter’s science section keeps missing. The Church does not require a six-day creation, a young earth, a whole-planet flood, or a single dated dispersal from Babel as terms of fellowship. On the origin of the human body it states plainly that it has no official position and refers such matters to scientific inquiry — a stance explored on our companion pages on the Latter-day Saint position on evolution. That same restraint governs the age and geological history of the earth. Members are commanded to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118) — a charter for taking the sciences seriously, not fleeing from them.

Verdict

Resolved. The science is not in dispute, and a faithful Latter-day Saint need not dispute it. There was no global flood in the geological record, no worldwide extinction around 2300 BCE, and no single ark that stocked the continents. None of that touches Latter-day Saint doctrine, because the Church has never canonized the young-earth, whole-planet reading the CES Letter attacks. The Hebrew idiom, the ancient-context scholarship, the regional-flood model, and the Church’s explicit refusal to fix a scientific model of earth history were all available — in print, before 2013 — and they answer every factual point Jeremy raises. He engaged the folk reading because it was easy to beat, and left the stronger reading untouched. That is the fork he chose.

Genuinely (and mildly) open. Faithful readers still differ on details: whether the Flood was a bounded historical catastrophe remembered across the ancient Near East or a more thoroughly typological narrative, and whether Babel records a single miraculous event or a symbolically told dispersal. These are matters of interpretation within faith, not evidence against it — and the Church’s deliberate silence leaves honest room for more than one answer. Living with that open space is not a weakness in Latter-day Saint belief. It is the maturity of a faith that refuses to make a geology textbook out of a covenant.

Further Study