In the Gilgamesh epic (2100-2000 BC), we read how the Sumerian god Ea warns a guy named Utnapishtim for an upcoming flood: 

“Tear down the house and build a boat!
Abandon wealth and seek living beings!
Make all living beings go up into the boat.
The boat which you are to build,
its dimensions must measure equal to each other:
its length must correspond to its width.
Roof it over like the Apsu.”

Utnapishtim builds the boat, roofs it over, and takes aboard the animals. Then all hell breaks loose: “Six days and seven nights came the wind and flood”.

When everything is calm again, Utnapishtim opens a vent, and finds his ark has stranded on Mount Nimush. To check if the world is really dry, Utnapishtim releases a pigeon, a swallow and a raven. Finally, Utnapishtim leaves the boat, and thanks Ea by bringing him a scent sacrifice.

Enter Noah’s story - which was written at least a thousand years later. It is roughly the same. Noah too opens a vent and finds that the ark has landed on a mountain. Noah releases a pigeon and a raven. And just like Utnapishtim, he too brings a scent sacrifice – a highly unusual ritual, in the bible.

And around 43 BC, the Roman poet Ovid recorded an ancient myth about the Roman-Greek ‘deluge’. This time, a man named Deucalion builds the ark. Along with his wife Pyrrha he bobs over the flooded world for nine days and nine nights, before hitting upon a mountain – in Ovid’s version, it’s Mount Parnassos in Greece.

All in all, it’s perfectly clear that the bible simply ‘recycled’ another, much older story that had proven successful for many hundreds of years. It's much like the so-manieth remake of King Kong or Dracula.

To us modern people it’s hard to understand, but the authors of the Old Testament would have found it no big deal to adapt a well-known tale for the bible. After all, Noah’s story isn’t about water – it’s about good and bad, and God’s special relationship with man.

People who say this forget one thing. Floods are a universal disaster. They happen everywhere. In that way, flood stories are the disaster movies of the ancient world! And you don’t have to take a disaster movie literally. Our world wasn’t really destroyed by aliens in the 20^th century, despite numerous books and movies claiming otherwise.

There are numerous reasons why Noah’s flood couldn’t have happened. First the blindingly obvious: there isn’t enough water on (and in) our planet to do it. You would need twice as much as the vast amount of water present on our globe. All the oceans, all ground water, all the lakes and rivers and frozen stuff on the poles – times two (we calculated it).

And there’s more. Currently, biologists have classified over 2 million species of animals. Most of them live in remote areas, like the Amazon, the poles or the desert. And we are to believe that Noah put them all in one ship?

And what about the various human races? The bible doesn’t mention the pygmees, the inuit (eskimo’s) or the Native Americans. And what about the plants and the trees? There are 300,000 species of those, too.

If you’re still not convinced, consider the geology. If the world really was flooded one day, you would notice it. You would find frozen Deluge Water sitting on mountain tops and on the poles. Everywhere on land, you would see traces of giant water flows (we’ve found them on Mars!). But in the real world, there is no such evidence whatsoever.

Still, there are many serious scientists who suspect that the story (or stories) is at least partially real. Perhaps it was inspired by a real, historical event. A dramatic flood of some sort, in which many people died.

For instance: the Black Sea and the Mediterranean filled up quite suddenly. According to one theory, Noah’s Deluge can be traced back to one of these dramatic events. Indeed, at the bottom of the Black Sea, archaeologists have found the deserted remains of prehistoric villages.

But nowadays, most serious scholars refute this theory. In recent years it has become clear that the Black Sea didn’t quite fill up as quickly. What’s more, the flood myths don’t fit with the filling up of the seas. They don’t mention anything about freshwater turning salt, and talk about rain, not about a tsunami out of nowhere that flooded the land.

Another possibility is that the Deluge simply echoes the memory of a certain now forgotten flood disaster in ancient Mesopotamia. In the delta of the Euphrates and the Tigris, floods occurred quite often. And after all, the delta is where the oldest versions of the stories come from!

In the end, it’s a debate of little value. You can’t prove it. You can’t disprove it. It’s fun – but it’s hardly science.

The story isn’t a realistic account of something that really happened for yet another reason: it is full of little contradictions. Bible researchers now understand that the flood story was written by at least two different authors. And they didn’t agree over a lot of things! That’s why in Noah’s flood story, you will find different numbers of animals that were taken aboard the Ark and conflicting mentions of how long the flood lasted.

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In total, there is 1,4 billion cubic kilometers of water present in, on and around the planet. 1,400,000,000 cubic kilometres – that’s HUGE. But to inundate the entire globe, you would need twice as much! You would need all the oceans, rivers, lakes and underground aquifers – times two. It just isn’t there.

The highest mountain tops are 8,8 kilometers high. The total area of the earth is 18,058 million square kilometers. So you would need to fill up 8,8 * 18,058,000,000 cubic kilometres of space = 1,3 billion cubic kilometres!