Considering that ERETZ refers to "land" or "country", why should anyone assume that Noah's Flood was GLOBAL in scope?
Even if one translates KOL ERETZ as "the whole earth", there is no evidence that the term in that ancient culture had any connotation of "the whole planet earth" or "the entire globe". The "earth" was simply everything that was within the boundaries of the horizons. "The earth" was the opposite of "the heavens". "The heavens" was everything above; "the earth" (HAARETZ) was everything "under the heavens." How could ancient Hebrew have possibly imposed a "planet-wide, global meaning" to a word that normally meant "land"?
Just as "falling to the earth" today means "falling to the ground", ERETZ has a wide semantic domain in Hebrew but is usually translated "land", even by the 1611 King James Bible. (Would anyone argue that ERETZ ISRAEL was meant to mean "the planet Israel" instead of "the Land of Israel"?)
And when the whole world came to Egypt during the famine to buy grain from Joseph, did Australians and the Japanese join the queues? Were all the nations of the planet earth involved in the trek to Egypt?
So, considering that the Bible says nothing about a GLOBAL flood and there is zero scientific evidence for a GLOBAL flood, why not simply say that the Bible describes a great flood which wiped out Noah's world and all mankind with it? (After all, if mankind stayed in just one area after the flood when the Tower of Babel incident finally led to their disbursal, why can't one simply assume that mankind stayed similarly concentrated in the time of Noah?)
Even if one translates KOL ERETZ as "the whole earth", there is no evidence that the term in that ancient culture had any connotation of "the whole planet earth" or "the entire globe". The "earth" was simply everything that was within the boundaries of the horizons. "The earth" was the opposite of "the heavens". "The heavens" was everything above; "the earth" (HAARETZ) was everything "under the heavens." How could ancient Hebrew have possibly imposed a "planet-wide, global meaning" to a word that normally meant "land"?
Just as "falling to the earth" today means "falling to the ground", ERETZ has a wide semantic domain in Hebrew but is usually translated "land", even by the 1611 King James Bible. (Would anyone argue that ERETZ ISRAEL was meant to mean "the planet Israel" instead of "the Land of Israel"?)
And when the whole world came to Egypt during the famine to buy grain from Joseph, did Australians and the Japanese join the queues? Were all the nations of the planet earth involved in the trek to Egypt?
So, considering that the Bible says nothing about a GLOBAL flood and there is zero scientific evidence for a GLOBAL flood, why not simply say that the Bible describes a great flood which wiped out Noah's world and all mankind with it? (After all, if mankind stayed in just one area after the flood when the Tower of Babel incident finally led to their disbursal, why can't one simply assume that mankind stayed similarly concentrated in the time of Noah?)