Let me be among the last to wonder how a national network okayed a program that manages to interview oceanographer Robert Ballard, no slacker when it comes to self-promotion and grandiosity, and jobs him. It takes his verbiage out of context and ratchets the bloviating right into cloud cuckoo land. And this by one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents in broadcasting, Christianne Amanpour.
The program ran in December as Christmas loomed with the modest title Mysteries of the Bible: Proof of Noah's Ark? ;
My goodness. This was a terrible bait and switch. Many watchers surely never got past the bait to recognize the switch. Selective editing and overdrawn overlines lead one to think that the biblical flood, you know a flood that is like the one in Genesis that covered all the world and followed a tremendous rain, has backing from geological and marine archaeological evidence. We see Ballard nodding enthusiastically yes to Amanpour's wide-eyed questions, declaring that the myths of many people may not only reflect an actual flood, but the mother of all floods. What might that evoke in a believer's mind – perhaps "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened" and eventually a dove fluttered to the ark and soon enough returned with evidence of emerging land, the top of Ararat rising above the all-encompassing sea?
For Ballard one should feel sympathy, even though he should have known he might be used. After the winking and hyperbolically breathless initial passages the program does, to be sure, get around to what is a marginal but not crazy 15-year-old hypothesis among some geographers and marine geologists. Which is that back in the neolithic 5600 years ago or so a rising sea level breached a natural dam at the Bosporus, formed a cataract that rapidly dug a wide entry, and roared into a vast plain below sea level on which early Near East peoples were settled. For them, it might have seemed that the whole world drowned. Thus filled the Black Sea. So it is said by some. It is a recent variant on ideas that the Mediterranean, much longer ago, similarly was nearly dry and way below sea level until the Atlantic sundered Gibraltar's gate. Lots of mammoths would have drowned in that one. Ballard does get to say, well along, that he believes in no worldwide flood and is not in the least bit expecting a giant ark to show up on his submersible's video feed.
But myths may be distorted renditions of real events. That's a legit story. It ought to be told that way from the start.
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