Chapter 17
What About Creation, Flood, and Language Division Legends?
Introduction
Nearly every culture around the world has a creation legend, and just as many have worldwide flood legends, and, believe it or not, there are even many language division legends around the world in different and diverse cultures.
In today’s highly secularized culture, there are attacks on the Bible using these legends. Those who do not trust what the Bible plainly says often speculate that the Bible’s discussion about creation, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel are just more legends and determine that the Bible cannot be trusted. What these attackers fail to realize is that these legends are a great confirmation of the Bible and that the Bible retains the true account recorded by God in His Word. From a historical perspective, these legends make perfect sense and are consistent with a biblical worldview, but it is hard to explain all these legends from a secular evolutionary worldview — people supposedly evolved and slowly filled the earth with a gradual changing of languages and no global Flood. Why then should we find so many common threads in so many accounts from all over the world? The evolutionary explanation fails to provide a reason for commonality, whereas the biblical one does.
The Nature of “Legends”
Of course, many of these legends have been distorted and have become highly mythologized and embellished over time; and these embellishments are to be expected as people dispersed from Babel and the knowledge of God and mankind’s early history was forgotten or turned into folklore. Many have common themes involving mankind being created from clay; a remnant understanding of God (i.e., a “god”) as angry with mankind for some reason; large boats (or rafts) being constructed to survive a coming flood, often foretold to the hero by this “god”; animals being collected by the hero in order to survive the coming deluge, and so on. Many of these legends sometimes still bear striking resemblances in many particulars to biblical accounts.
Many, though, are drastically different and show corruption from an original account, as one would expect from an orally passed-down story. Others show details that seem to be in direct contrast to the biblical accounts of creation and the Flood. We see numerous examples of “gods” being killed to create the physical earth and/or heavens, mankind given power by the “gods” to create the animals, mankind re-creating the earth after the Flood, animals that rescue people from the Flood, and so on. Some of these may be the result of distortion over time, while others may be a deliberate attempt by post-Babel peoples to reshape the world and the “gods” in their own image. Romans chapter 1 clearly shows that human hearts and minds willfully suppress the true God and make up one in their own image, or in the image of animals (see also Genesis 8:21; Exodus 32:4–8; 1 Kings 12:28–33; and Jeremiah 17:5–9).
Legends from Genesis 1–11 That Confirm the Bible
There is no way to exhaustively cover this topic in such a short article, as there are literally hundreds of books detailing these creation, Flood, and language division legends. Rather, ten of each will be discussed in the following tables.
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