“All the World”—What Genesis Really Says About Noah’s Flood

A Christ-centred look at language, geology, and our own Christadelphian history

“Considering the comparatively limited extent of the human family at the time … it would seem reasonable to conclude … that the flood was co-extensive only with the Adamically-inhabited portion of the globe.” (Robert Roberts, The Visible Hand of God, 1881)

For most of my life I never questioned the Sunday-school picture of a cruise-ship Ark floating above an ocean-covered planet with every species of animal on board. Yet the more closely I listened to Scripture—and to earlier Christadelphian voices—the more I realised that the Bible itself never insists on a flood that swamped Antarctica, Yakutsk, or the tip of Patagonia. In fact, many of our own pioneers argued precisely the opposite.

In this post we will:

Revisit the Hebrew language Genesis uses for “all the earth.”
See in Christadelphian history that Bro. Roberts, Bro. Alan Hayward, C. C. Walker, and a 1934 Testimony writer all favoured some version of a limited flood.
Ask how the Nephilim (the giants “and also afterward”) fit into any flood model.
Consider geological and zoological common sense.
Draw a practical, faith-building conclusion.

1. Hebrew Hyperbole: “All” and “Under the Whole Heaven”

Anyone who reads the Old Testament in English quickly meets vast, sweeping phrases:

“All the high hills under the whole heaven were covered” (Gen 7 : 19).
“All countries came to Egypt to buy grain” (Gen 41 : 57).
“I will begin to put the dread of you upon the peoples under the whole heaven” (Deut 2 : 25).

No one imagines Pharaoh’s granaries fed Māori villages in New Zealand, or that the Canaanite campaign terrified Stone-Age Siberians. The hyperbole communicates totality within the author’s horizon. Scripture itself trains us to hear it that way.

Bro. John Burke made the same point in Living on the Edge (LOTE). Lining up Genesis 7 next to Ezekiel 38, Deuteronomy 2, and other “world-language” texts, he concluded that kol (“all”) and tahat kol-ha-shamayim (“under all heaven”) flex quite naturally to regional context. Once that is granted, the flood narrative can be taken at face value without inflating it into a planetary cataclysm.

2. A Christadelphian Heritage of Taking Science—and Hebrew—Seriously

2.1 Robert Roberts (1881)

Roberts was no liberal. Yet in The Visible Hand of God he reasoned that the stark diversity of Australia’s marsupials versus Asia’s mammals versus America’s fauna is inexplicable if every creature died and the same post-diluvian gene pool re-stocked every continent. He therefore located the flood “only in the humanly populated district.”

2.2 Alan Hayward (1980s)

Bro. Hayward, an old-earth creationist, wrestled honestly with geology’s testimony:

“A great deal of evidence was found that showed the structure of the earth’s crust has been millions of years forming. The idea of a world-wide flood was gradually abandoned by practically all geologists, for want of evidence … There is nothing in Genesis to prove that the Flood was worldwide.”

Hayward then catalogued half a dozen Old-Testament “all the world” idioms (Joseph’s famine, Ahab’s man-hunt for Elijah, Cyrus’ rule, etc.) and argued that a Hebrew reader would instinctively hear Genesis 6–8 the same way.

2.3 C. C. Walker & Early Testimony Writers

An anonymous 1934 Testimony answer to “Question 31” speaks with striking clarity:

“There exist no traces of any associated inundation elsewhere. Hence the tendency … to interpret the Flood narrative as having reference to only a limited area … Evidence for the continuity of the human species in many quarters of the globe … is far too strong to be resisted.”

The writer even notes that the Ur excavations had already unearthed a thick flood-silt layer in the Euphrates basin—strong circumstantial evidence for a catastrophic Mesopotamian flood rather than a global one.

3. The Nephilim Problem: Giants “And Also Afterward”

Genesis 6 : 4 slips in a tantalising editorial aside:

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward.”

Standard critical commentaries (Wenham, Hamilton, Sarna, Alter) see in that clause a deliberate wink to Numbers 13 : 33, where Israel’s spies meet the sons of Anak … the Nephilim in Canaan. Scholars from Coxon to Hendel recognise the text is telling us the giants survived the flood somehow.

The global-flood model must therefore posit:

a second irruption of angelic “sons of God,” or
surviving giants aboard the Ark (!), or
a textual gloss so late it rewrites the history it reports.

A regional flood sidesteps the dilemma entirely. If Noah’s deluge is bounded by the Fertile Crescent, Canaanite giants twenty generations later present no contradiction.

4. Geological and Zoological Puzzles

Bro. Roberts’ koalas and polar bears illustrate the logistical nightmare a post-global-flood migration entails. How did eucalyptus-dependent marsupials cross thousands of kilometres of ocean to reach their exclusive diet in Australia? How did predators with specific diets wait patiently for the single breeding pair of their prey to breed enough food all while journeying together thousands of kilometers? How did animals built for cold climates survive the trek from the warm middle east to the frigid poles?

Add the ice layers in Greenland and Antarctica whose annual bands record hundreds of thousands of seasons without interruption, coral reefs that grow a few millimetres a year yet stand tens of metres thick, and the neatly ordered volcanic ash-blossom couplets in Japanese lake cores. Every evidence line demands either a cavalcade of ad-hoc miracles—or a more modest, local reading of Genesis.

5. Common Objections Answered

Objection	Local-flood reply
“But Genesis says all flesh died!”	Hebrew kol-basar functions like “all the land” in Joseph’s famine (Gen 41 : 57). It means all people and animals in the flood-zone.
“Peter calls it ‘the world of the ungodly’ (2 Pe 2 : 5). Surely that is global.”	“World” (kosmos) in Greek can be local as well (Luke 2 : 1 “all the world be taxed”). Peter’s focus is moral: God judged the ungodly civilisation known to Scripture.
“A local flood makes the Ark unnecessary—Noah could just walk away.”	Genesis emphasises suddenness: “the fountains of the great deep burst forth.” A Mesopotamian family hemmed in by rising waters had no time to migrate hundreds of kilometres. An Ark was both necessary and more than adequate.
“Regional language cheapens the covenant sign of the rainbow.”	God’s promise is that He will never again destroy that world in that way—the civilised land once under judgement. Region or planet, the theological point stands: divine mercy restrains repeat cataclysm.

6. Where Do We Go from Here?

Hold the text and the rocks together. We need not force geology to say what it plainly does not say; nor must we bend Scripture to twentieth-century fundamentalism. Hebrew idiom already gives us the interpretive key.
Remember our own history. Claims that a global flood is “the only Christadelphian view” ignore a century of published, peer-reviewed ecclesial thought. Diversity of opinion was normal before The Genesis Flood (Morris & Whitcomb, 1961) redirected evangelical—and then Christadelphian—popular imagination.
Focus on the message. Whether the flood drowned a valley or the entire planet, its theology is crystal: “God spared not the ancient world … but preserved Noah … a preacher of righteousness” (2 Pe 2 : 5). The story warns every generation that human evil invites judgment, while salvation comes by obedient faith.

7. A Personal Word to Readers

I have found that embracing a local-but-total Mesopotamian flood sharpens rather than blunts my reverence for Scripture. The narrative’s moral gravity deepens when I see it rooted in reality not opposed to it due to a forced narrow reading. The Ark is not a quasi-mythological container of Chinese pandas; it is an act of mercy for a family caught in an overwhelming Middle-Eastern cataclysm.

The same God still shuts doors of safety for His people (Gen 7:16) and still remembers those inside (Gen 8:1). And the same rainbow arches over every storm—regional or global—as a covenant of steadfast love.

“There is nothing un-Christadelphian about believing in a local flood.” – Alan Hayward, letter to The Christadelphian, 1984

May that charity of spirit continue as we explore God’s Word together.

by Daniel Edgecombe

Living Faith