[Avodah] Birds & Fish in the Mabul

[hankman]

R’ Harchinam wrote:

What evidence? There is none, really. Just taking Gaza in EY for an
example, it was a total desert wasteland for many decades when there were
no Jews there and after the Jews came back it looked like no one ever left.
There were people living in many areas before the mabul, people were wiped
out, and then people came back there. There are artifacts and leavings from
various times in history, but there is absolutely no way to find proof of
artifacts from the specific one-year period of the mabul or the few years
afterwards. And floods don't dissolve artifacts, they bury them and/or wash
them away. We see that after terrible flooding and natural disasters in
various parts of the world they are rebuilt and look basically "good as
new" afterwards. It doesn't take that long for humans to reproduce and to
repopulate areas that were once barren -- EY is proof of that.

CM responds:

Even if one were to accept your argument concerning the artifacts of the inhabited areas of the world at that time (as sparsley as the world was then populated),  I think one still has major explaining to take care of with how you would expect the fossil record in the uninhabited world of the period to show up today. Following a flood of global proportions killing off all land life outside the Teiva one would expect that all the cadavers would eventually collect and settle in great disorder and all mixed together when finally brought to rest by the receding waters in many low lying areas many of which would be remote from human settlement for a long time. These would be at one stratum (that of the mabul) readily identified by these many collections of fossils over the entire globe. This stratum should at the very least have many such large random collections of fossils of the fauna circa 4000 years ago at dips in the terrain that collected there post Mabul as it dried up on all of the continents. I think this expectation is not met in any known stratum that has so far been uncovered.

Kol Tuv

Chaim Manaster
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