OBJECTION 1. The ark (Gen. vi, 15, 16), could not contain all the animals which are said to have entered it, together with the proper provisions for them during the time of the deluge.
ANSWER. On accurate computation, the contrary has been proved; so that what was thought an objection becomes even an evidence for the truth of the Mosaic history. The dimensions of the ark were three hundred cubits in length, fifty in breadth, and thirty in height; and it consisted of three stories or floors. Reckoning the cubit at eighteen inches, Dr. Hales proves the ark to have been of the burthen of 42,413 tons. "A first-rate man-of-war is between 2200 and 2300 tons: and, consequently, the ark had the capacity to stowage of eighteen of such ships, the largest in present use, and might carry 20,000 men, with provision for six months, besides the weight of 1800 cannons, and of all military stores. Can we doubt of its being sufficient to contain eight persons, and about two-hundred or two hundred and fifty pair of four-footed animals; a number to which, according to M. Buffon, all the various distinct species may be reduced, together with all the subsistence necessary for a twelve month?" To these are to be added all the fowls of the air, and such reptiles and insects as cannot live under water. Other calculations have been made, to show that the ark was of sufficient capacity for all the purposes for which it was designed; but as they are larger than that above given, they are here designedly omitted.
OBJ. 2. As the same causes must always produce the same effects, it is objected as an absurdity in the Mosaic history (Gen. ix, 13), to speak of the rainbow as formed after the flood, and as the sign of a covenant then made; because, as that phenomenon results from the immutable laws of refraction and reflection of the sun's rays in drops of falling rain, it is certain that the rainbow must have been occasionally exhibited from the beginning of the world.
ANS. But the original does not say that God set the rainbow in the cloud. The word translated, I do set my bow in the cloud, may be (as indeed it ought to be) rendered, with great propriety, I do appoint my bow in the cloud, to be a sign or token of the covenant between me and the earth; and a fit sign it certainly was, because the patriarch knew that there never was, nor ever can be, a rainbow, but when there is sunshine as well as rain. "What purpose then was served by the rainbow? The very best purpose so well expressed by the sacred historian, when he represents God as saying, This is the token of the covenant which I will make between me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations; for natural and inanimate objects—such as pillars and heaps of stones—were considered as tokens, and even a kind of witnesses in the contracts of all the civilized nations of remote antiquity. Of this we have several instances in the books of the Old Testament, but surely not one so apposite as that of the rainbow. Noah and his sons undoubtedly knew—either by the science of the antediluvian world, or by the immediate teaching of God—that the rainbow is a physical proof, as long as it is seen, that a general deluge is not to be dreaded; and therefore if their minds, filled with terror and astonishment at what they had escaped should ever have become fearfully apprehensive of a future deluge, the sight of the bow would immediately dissipate their fears. The science of Noah and his sons, which taught them the physical connection of the sign and the thing signified, was soon lost, with other truths of greater importance, when their descendants were scattered in small tribes over the face of the whole earth: but the remembrance of the flood, as well as some confused notions of the rainbow being a kind of information from the gods to men, appear to have been preserved by tradition among all nations; and thousands of pious Christians, without knowing anything of the physical causes of the rainbow, consider it at that day as a token, and even a pledge (as even in truth it is), that the earth will not again be destroyed by a deluge."
OBJ. 3. If all mankind sprang from Noah, the second parent of the human race, it is impossible to account for the origin of the blacks, if the patriarch and his wife were white.
ANS. But this difference in color does not invalidate the narrative of Moses; for it has been ascertained that the influence of climate, and the local circumstances of air, water, food, customs, &c., are sufficient to account for the dissimilarity which is discovered in the appearance of different nations. If dogs, taken to the frigid zone, grow shaggy; and if sheep, transported to the torid zone, exchange their wool for hair, why may not the human species gradually partake of the influence of climate? as experience shows that it does.
Man was formed to reside in all climates. "Man," says an eminent naturalist, who was by no means a bigot in favor of Scripture history, "though white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and red in America, is still the same animal, tinged only with the color of the climate. Where the heat is excessive, as in Guinea and Senegal, the people are perfectly black; where less excessive, as in Abyssinia, the people are less black; where it is more temperate, as in Barbary and Arabia, they are brown; and where mild, as in Europe and Lesser Asia, they are fair." In further corroboration of the influence of climate on the human complexion, we may remark, that there is a colony of Jews, who have been settled at Cochin on the Malabar coast from a very remote period, of which they have lost the memory. Though originally a fair people from Palestine, and from their customs preserving themselves unmixed, they are now become as black as the other Malabarians, who are scarcely a shade lighter than the negroes of Guinea, Benin, or Angola. At Ceylon, also, the Portuguese, who settled there only a few centuries ago, are become blacker than the natives; and the Portuguese, who settled near the Mundingoes, about three hundred years since, differ so little from them as to be called negroes, which they resent as a high indignity.
In short, to adopt the memorable conclusion of the indefatigable philosopher above cited (who deduced it after a minute inquiry from a great number of the best attested observations): "From every circumstance, proof may be obtained that mankind are not composed of species essentially different from each other; that, on the contrary, there was originally but one individual species of men, which, after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent various changes, from the influence of climate, from the difference of food and mode of living, from epidemical disorders, as also from the intermixture, varied ad infinitum, of individuals more or less resembling each other; that these alterations were at first less considerable, and confined to individuals; that afterward, from the continued action of the above causes becoming more general, more sensible, and more fixed, they formed varieties of the species; and that these varieties have been and still are perpetuated from generation to generation, in the same manner as certain disorders and certain maladies pass from parents to their children."
OBJ. 4. The peopling of America and of several islands, in which mischievous terrestrial animals are found, has also been urged as an objection against the universality of the deluge, and consequently against the credibility of the Mosaic history.
ANSWER. Modern geographical discoveries have removed the weight of this objection. The straits which divide North America from Tartary are so narrow as to admit of a very easy passage from one continent to the other; and it is not impossible that they might even have been united by an isthmus, which the combined influence of time and the waves has demolished. The resemblance found between the inhabitants of the opposite sides of that passage and their uncivilized state and rude ignorance of the arts, prove them to have had one common origin. So fully convinced was M. Buffon of this fact, long before the last and most important discoveries on the subject, that he declares he has "no doubt, independently of every theological consideration, that the origin of the Americans is the same with our own."
The parts of the new world which are disjoined from the others, and which have been represented by ignorance and infidelity as vast continents, are by the most recent and complete researches reduced to a few inconsiderable islands; whose inhabitants were, in all probability, conveyed to their present settlements from islands adjacent to the continent of Asia, from which continent all the inhabitants of the new world (excepting the Esquimeaux and a few other American tribes that are evidently descended from the Greenlanders)190have migrated. Nor can it excite surprise, that we are unacquainted with the circumstances of their migration, when we consider that this event probably happened at no great distance from the time when our own ancestors set out from the same regions, to people the western world, by an opposite route.
VIII. The first remarkable occurrence after the flood was the attempt to build the Tower of Babel [Gen. xi, 1-4]; and this is not omitted in pagan records.
Berosus, the Chaldee historian, mentions it, with the following additional circumstances, that it was erected by giants who waged war against the gods, and were at length dispersed, and that the edifice was beaten down by a great wind. According to Josephus, the building of this tower is also mentioned by Hestiaeus, and by one of the ancient sibyls, and also, as Eusebius informs us, by Abydenus and Eupolemus. The tower of Belus, mentioned by Herodotus, is, in all probability, the tower of Babel, repaired by Belus II., king of Babylon, who is frequently confounded by the ancient historians with Belus I., or Nimrod. That it was constructed with burnt bricks and bitumen (as we read in Gen. xi, 3), is attested by Justin, Quintus Curtius, Vitruvius, and other heathen writers, and also by the relations of modern travelers, who have described its ruins.—Horne's Introduction.