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New Defender's Study Bible Notes
7:19 all the high hills. The double superlative precludes the use of “all” in a relative sense here. The obvious intent of the writer was to describe a universal inundation.
7:20 mountains. The words “high hills” and “mountains” are the same in the original Hebrew. The waters were 15 cubits (22.5 feet) above the highest mountains, patently including Mount Ararat, which is now 17,000 feet high. In the “local-flood” theory, Mt. Ararat would have had the same elevation before and after the Flood, but it should be obvious that a 17,000-foot flood is not a local flood!
7:21 moved upon the earth. “All flesh” died that moved on land. In a local flood, at least most of the animals (certainly all the birds!) would escape to higher ground.
7:22 breath of life. The “breath (Hebrew neshamah) of life” is clearly stated here to be a component of animal life as well as human life. Thus animals possess “spirit,” but not the “image of God.”
7:23 every living substance. The rocks of the earth’s crust now contain the fossil remains of unnumbered billions of plants and animals, buried in water-transported sediments which quickly became lithified. This “geologic column” has been grossly distorted by evolutionists into the record of an imagined three-billion-year history of evolution during the geological ages. Actually it represents the deposits of the cataclysmic Flood, with the fossil order primarily depicting the relative elevations of the habitats–and therefore the usual order of sedimentary burial in the Flood–of the organisms of the pre-Flood world. Many modern geologists are again admitting the necessity of catastrophic formation and burial to explain the fossiliferous rocks in the geologic column. The reason why very few fossil men (also few fossilized flying birds) are found in the rocks is their high mobility and ability to escape burial in sediments. When eventually drowned, their bodies would remain on the surface until they decayed.
7:24 prevailed. The third emphasis is on the waters “prevailing” (Genesis 7:18,19,24). This highest intensity of flood action continued for five months.