The Violet Race After the Days of Adam

78:7.1The river dwellers were ac­cus­tomed to rivers over­flow­ing their banks at cer­tain sea­sons; these pe­ri­odic floods were an­nual events in their lives. But new per­ils threat­ened the val­ley of Mes­o­po­ta­mia as a re­sult of pro­gres­sive ge­o­logic changes to the north.

78:7.2For thou­sands of years af­ter the sub­mer­gence of the first Eden the moun­tains about the east­ern coast of the Med­i­ter­ra­nean and those to the north­west and north­east of Mes­o­po­ta­mia con­tin­ued to rise. This el­e­va­tion of the high­lands was greatly ac­cel­er­ated about 5000 B.C., and this, to­gether with greatly in­creased snow­fall on the north­ern moun­tains, caused un­prece­dented floods each spring through­out the Eu­phrates val­ley. These spring floods grew in­creas­ingly worse so that even­tu­ally the in­hab­i­tants of the river re­gions were driven to the east­ern high­lands. For al­most a thou­sand years scores of cities were prac­ti­cally de­serted be­cause of these ex­ten­sive del­uges.

78:7.3Al­most five thou­sand years later, as the He­brew priests in Baby­lo­nian cap­tiv­ity sought to trace the Jew­ish peo­ple back to Adam, they found great dif­fi­culty in piec­ing the story to­gether; and it oc­curred to one of them to aban­don the ef­fort, to let the whole world drown in its wicked­ness at the time of Noah’s flood, and thus to be in a bet­ter po­si­tion to trace Abra­ham right back to one of the three sur­viv­ing sons of Noah.

78:7.4The tra­di­tions of a time when wa­ter cov­ered the whole of the earth’s sur­face are uni­ver­sal. Many races har­bor the story of a world-wide flood some time dur­ing past ages. The Bib­li­cal story of Noah, the ark, and the flood is an in­ven­tion of the He­brew priest­hood dur­ing the Baby­lo­nian cap­tiv­ity. There has never been a uni­ver­sal flood since life was es­tab­lished on Uran­tia. The only time the sur­face of the earth was com­pletely cov­ered by wa­ter was dur­ing those Archeo­zoic ages be­fore the land had be­gun to ap­pear.

78:7.5But Noah re­ally lived; he was a wine maker of Aram, a river set­tle­ment near Erech. He kept a writ­ten rec­ord of the days of the river’s rise from year to year. He brought much ridicule upon him­self by go­ing up and down the river val­ley ad­vo­cat­ing that all houses be built of wood, boat fash­ion, and that the fam­ily an­i­mals be put on board each night as the flood sea­son ap­proached. He would go to the neigh­bor­ing river set­tle­ments ev­ery year and warn them that in so many days the floods would come. Fi­nally a year came in which the an­nual floods were greatly aug­mented by un­usu­ally heavy rain­fall so that the sud­den rise of the wa­ters wiped out the en­tire vil­lage; only Noah and his im­me­di­ate fam­ily were saved in their house­boat.

78:7.6These floods com­pleted the dis­rup­tion of And­ite civ­i­liza­tion. With the end­ing of this pe­riod of del­uge, the sec­ond gar­den was no more. Only in the south and among the Sume­ri­ans did any trace of the for­mer glory re­main.

78:7.7The rem­nants of this, one of the old­est civ­i­liza­tions, are to be found in these re­gions of Mes­o­po­ta­mia and to the north­east and north­west. But still older ves­tiges of the days of Dala­ma­tia ex­ist un­der the wa­ters of the Per­sian Gulf, and the first Eden lies sub­merged un­der the east­ern end of the Med­i­ter­ra­nean Sea.