The Flood (with Rabbi Alexander Hool)

In his new book The Flood: Torah, History and Archaeology, Rabbi Alexander Hool confronts what he calls a “serious problem”: the Torah’s timeline places the global flood at 2105 BCE, but the archaeological record shows no disruption at that date—civilizations in China, Europe, and the Middle East were flourishing in continuity. The book’s central argument is that this contradiction dissolves once we recognize that carbon dating, the primary tool for dating that period, is systematically inaccurate for the era before the flood, and that the flood’s true archaeological signature appears several thousand years earlier in the conventional dating system.

The Torah’s Timeline and the Apparent Conflict

The Torah provides a meticulous chronology from creation to the destruction of the Second Temple. Working backward from well-established historical dates, Rabbi Hool notes that creation is placed at 3760 BCE, and the flood occurred 1,656 years later, in 2105 BCE. Because the flood was a miraculous event that destroyed all of humanity except Noah’s family, one would expect to find a global cessation of civilization at that precise time—a sudden break in archaeological strata everywhere. Yet standard archaeological dating shows no such break around 2105 BCE. Instead, civilizations appear to continue uninterrupted. This is the puzzle the book sets out to solve.