Fountains of the Deep
Genesis 7:11-12
“In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.”
The Flood began with two geophysical events – the bursting forth of Fountains of the Great Deep and the opening of the Windows of Heaven. But what could these events have actually looked like?
Starting with the Fountains of the Great Deep, this would appear to be a reference to volcanic activity. We can envisage cracks opening up in deep points of the pre-Flood ocean. Possibly magma came through these rocks, but also, we expect that a lot of super-heated water would emerge, thrown at supersonic speed high into the atmosphere. In other words, these fountains would have been similar to the ocean floor springs that exist today, but on a larger and more violent scale. This would have been the main source of the overwhelming majority of the floodwaters which covered the Earth. And after the water had been thrown high into the atmosphere, it would have returned to the Earth as torrential rain, so this is probably what is meant by the Windows of Heaven – more correctly, the Floodgates of Heaven. There would not have been enough moisture in the pre-Flood atmosphere to produce the amount of floodwater required, whereas the mechanism suggested, called Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, flows from Scripture, and seems to fit scientific observations.
Prayer: Father God, we are humbled when we think of the amazing power of Your creation and the truth of Your word that You did everything exactly in the way that You said. Amen.
Ref: Snelling, A. (2009), Earth's Catastrophic Past, Master Books, pp. 275-276.
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