On the Universality of Noah's Flood: A Preliminary Dissertation

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Original title: De diluvii universalitate dissertatio prolusoria A short Latin work of learned disputation, running to some 109 pages and printed at Geneva in 1667, which asks whether the Flood of Noah covered the entire globe of the earth or only one inhabited region of it. Opening with an editorial address to the fair reader and framing itself as a merely preliminary, conjectural exercise, it first states the received case for a universal inundation at full strength, then audits the physical requirement by measurement — reckoning mountain heights in miles against the fifteen cubits of Scripture and concluding that a global flood would demand water equal to ten oceans and more. It successively refuses the reservoirs proposed by the schools (the sea, a subterranean abyss, rarefaction, the Aristotelian decuple conversion of air into water, supercelestial waters), declines recourse to miracle where natural causes might suffice, and denies that a vacuum can be admitted. It then re-reads the Mosaic universals as synecdoche and hyperbole, controlled by parallel scriptural cases (the famine of Genesis 41, Nebuchadnezzar's world-kingdom, the Augustan census, the darkness at the Crucifixion, Acts' "every nation under heaven"), narrowing universalitas to the oecumene or inhabited earth. Drawing on chronology, settlement patterns, the absence of antediluvian navigation, cartographic description of Asia as enclosed by seas, and euhemerist etymologies of pagan myth (Theba as the ark, Janus as Noah, Enoch as Atlas), it concludes that the Flood was confined to Asia, "the fourth part of the globe." A closing corollary catalogues interpretations the Church has licitly changed, answers the charge of private interpretation, and submits the whole as a conjecture to the judgement of the learned, with the author professing to wish to die an exterminator of new dogmas. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

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Anabon est 1 saucy Vossing. Vide Placein 12. 711. reg. No.