If the flood was local, instead of global like the Bible says, Noah was an idiot.

When God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s nephew, Lot, was living there with his family. God didn’t have Lot build a shelter to hide in. He didn’t have Lot collect two of every kind of animal in the area to preserve them. God just told Lot to gather his family and run away. So, Lot and family run away, and God nukes Sodom and Gomorrah from space.

In short, God sends angels to Lot and they say, “God’s going to torch this place. You better get out of here.” And Lot gets out of there.

So if the flood was a local event, like the destruction of Sodom, and one for which Noah had lots of advanced warning and many years to prepare, what sense does it make to tell him to build an ark and fill it with animals when he and the animals could simply move to Higher Ground and avoid the flood entirely? A flood would be easier to outrun than a rain of fire from the heavens. God should have told Noah, “I’m going to flood this place out. You better get out of here.” And Noah would have grabbed his wife and kids and gotten out of there.

Instead, we’re supposed to believe that God shows up and says, “Hey, I’m flooding your whole neighborhood, from 7th avenue to 31st. All of that is going to be under water, over the highest mountain. Well, the highest mountain in your neighborhood.”

And Noah says, naturally, “Thanks for the warning. I’ll grab my wife and kids and get out of here!” But then God says, “No, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to build an enormous floating zoo, because I’m going to have you fill it with the animals that live around here.”
And Noah would be all, “ALL of them? There’s a lot of animals in this neighborhood.”
And God would say, “Oh, no, not all of them. You’re just going to take two of each kind.”
And Noah would look at the blueprints and say, “This seems awfully big for only two of each kind.”

Does somebody want to tell me why Noah wouldn’t just pack up the station wagon and get out of town? Again, what animals lived around there that couldn’t just walk off on their own? And what kind of rare, special animals lived in this one wicked area that needed to be saved from a flood anyway? In Deuteronomy 13 God tells the Israelites that if they find certain wickedness in their land, they should kill not only the inhabitance of a town, but all of their animals too. And then they are to burn the whole place to the ground and NEVER rebuild it. But this time around, the locals were so wicked that they needed to be flooded out, and yet their animals were so special that they had to be saved, and yet so prone to car sickness that they couldn’t be taken to the next town over?

Also, Noah and his family were on the ark for more than a year. If they had had any sense at all then they could have paddled to the nearest shore and gotten off the ark in less than six weeks. And that’s assuming they waited until the rains died down. But if it was a local flood, they might have been able to paddle out from under it. Either way, they could probably see land every time they looked out. IN EVERY DIRECTON. What sense does it make to stay on a floating Zoo in the middle of a lake just waiting for the lake to go down when you could just paddle in LITERALLY ANY DIRECTION and get off the boat in as little as a couple of hours?

Was there really a big enough Lake formed that quickly with them in the middle of it and then they stayed in the middle of it somehow and never drifted near land? Even if it was the size of one of the Great Lakes, a single day of strong winds would be enough to push them to shore. But then what? Are we expected to believe that the Noah family spent their time paddling AWAY from the shore to avoid ending the voyage too soon?

And what’s with the birds being sent out to find dry land? They wouldn’t have been able to stay away from the shore. They would have been able to see land as soon as the rain let up a little. If the flood is local, and they were on the ark for a FULL YEAR, then we are being asked to believe that Noah and company INTENTIONALLY sailed away from land, because there’s no way they were staying adrift in the middle of a lake for a full year without wandering to the edge.

Then another thing, if the rains came down for 40 days and the water rose for 150 days, but this was just a local flood, then how is it that all of the people in the area failed to climb to Higher Ground? They had a month to get out of the way. How stupid were all of these people but they could not get out of the way of a month-long rainstorm or at the very least hop on something that floats and float to safety?

If this was a local flood then there would have been land in literally any Direction they could float or paddle or swim to. How did those idiots even die in the flood? Are we supposed to believe that the heaviest part of the rains and the greatest rise of water took place in the first day or so? Was there just a light sprinkling for the next 39 days?

We do not know how long it took to build the ark. Some people speculate it could have taken a hundred years or other people think it took closer to 50. Let’s assume that they only spent two years working on it. Period. Two years to cut down all the trees and make all the timber and build a boat and gather all the animals and the food for the animals before the rains came.

Then let’s assume that Noah had a moment of clarity. He decided that if the place he was was so evil that God was going to flood it away, he didn’t want to be in that place anymore. So instead of building a giant boat, he gathered up everything he could fit into his Little Red Wagon and college backpack and he started walking.

Now let’s assume that Noah could walk 5 miles a day. That’s less than half a mile an hour with 12 hours off to eat and sleep.

And let’s assume that he took weekends off. In a month you could be a hundred miles away from wherever the flood was going to happen. In the two years when he could have been building an ark, if you just walked away at a leisurely pace- a little bit every day but only on weekdays- he could have been more than two thousand miles away from the evil place that was getting flooded and he would not have had to build a temporary floating zoo in order to do it.

So the story as we are told by “local flood” proponents is that God in his wisdom, knowing that nobody in the area would survive the flood except Noah and his family, decided instead of sending Noah and his family away from danger as he did later with Lot and his family, to have him instead spend time- surely many years- building a Giant floating Zoo and then had him live on that Zoo for more than a year instead of paddling to shore even though the rains stopped coming down and the water stop rising only a hundred and fifty days into the journey.

What was the point of all of that? Even ignoring all of the ways in which this story clearly contradicts the story told in the Bible, the local flood theory makes Noah into the dumbest guy in the Bible, with the Ark being God’s most pointless command. The lesson here kids, is when you change the Bible, you are making it worse. God did a good job when he had it written. Let’s not change it.