ReViews

The Quest for Noah’s Flood

National Geographic Video, 1 hr., $19.95 To order, call 1–800-627–5162 or go to nationalgeographic.com

There’s nothing like a sexy Biblical connection to heighten interest in an otherwise unrelated subject.

The Quest for Noah’s Flood tells two stories in one: The search by underwater explorer Robert Ballard (the man who found the Titanic) for ancient ships in the depths of the Black Sea and his hunt for signs of human habitation in that sea’s shallow waters. It’s the latter that raises the Biblical connection. Two respected geologists, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, have suggested that the Black Sea was once much smaller than it is today. About 7,000 years ago, they theorize, waters from a swollen Mediterranean broke through the narrow straits of the Bosporus and flooded the shores of the Black Sea.^a This massive flood, they further suggest, was remembered by the people who escaped the devastation and was retold through the generations in the neighboring lands to which they had fled, and was later preserved in the Mesopotamian flood stories and in the Biblical account of Noah’s flood.