Science & Archaeologynoahfloodgenesisgeology

Noah’s Flood

Must Latter-day Saints insist on a recent global flood that covered Everest, against the geologic record?

Bible

The Bible answers

Bible · Genesis 7:19–20

KJV + NRSVUE

All the high hills. Ancient writers use total language. The point is judgment and a covenant, not a hydrology exam.

King James Version
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

NRSVUE
The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. The waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon answers

Alma 10:22
Yea, and I say unto you that if it were not for the prayers of the righteous, who are now in the land, that ye would even now be visited with utter destruction; yet it would not be by flood, as were the people in the days of Noah, but it would be by famine, and by pestilence, and the sword.

Ether 13:2
After the waters had receded from off the face of this land. A flood tradition in the Jaredite record too.
For behold, they rejected all the words of Ether; for he truly told them of all things, from the beginning of man; and that after the waters had receded from off the face of this land it became a choice land above all other lands, a chosen land of the Lord; wherefore the Lord would have that all men should serve him who dwell upon the face thereof;

Ancient witnesses

Dead Sea Scrolls and related extra-biblical texts that illuminate the same pattern the Restoration restores.

1 Enoch, Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 6–11)

Go to Noah and say to him in my name, “Hide yourself,” and reveal to him that the end is approaching, that the whole earth will be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth and will destroy all that is on it. Teach Noah how he may escape, and his seed may be preserved for all generations.

Second Temple Jews retold the Flood as judgment on a corrupted world and on the Watchers. The point is moral and cosmic, in the language of “the whole earth” as they knew it.

Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen)

The Genesis Apocryphon retells Noah’s birth, the coming of the waters, and the ark in a First Temple / Second Temple idiom, placing the Flood inside a living Jewish narrative rather than a modern globe-and-Everest puzzle.

“All the high hills under the whole heaven” is the language of ancient cosmology and of total judgment on the world of Noah’s hearers. Latter-day Saints can affirm a real cataclysm, a real prophet, a real covenant, and a real ark without pretending the geologic column records a single recent drenching of Kilimanjaro. Ether 13:2’s waters receding from “this land” already lets the text speak in land-sized, not necessarily planet-sized, terms.

Faithful answers

FAIR

Mormonism and Science

FAIR Latter-day Saints

Some Latter-day Saints read the Flood as global; some as universal in purpose and local or regional in hydrology; some as an ancient cosmic-temple narrative of de-creation and re-creation. The Church has not canonized a scientific model. What it has canonized is Noah, judgment, covenant, and the rainbow’s Lord.

There is no official Church position that the Flood must be a geologically global event covering the entire planet. Members should not treat a particular scientific reconstruction as if it were Article of Faith 10.

Genesis uses the language of the world as Noah’s people knew it. Universal judgment does not automatically equal a spherical-earth bathymetry problem.
Mesopotamian flood traditions (Atrahasis, Gilgamesh) show the story’s antiquity. That supports a real memory, not a nineteenth-century fiction.
A worldwide flood in recent millennia is not what the rocks show. Honesty here is not unbelief. It is refusing to make the gospel hostage to a young-earth package God never required.
The Restoration’s interest in Noah is covenant, priesthood, and the family of the earth—not a war with sedimentology.

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