Genesis 7:19

“They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.”  Genesis 7:19

The flood waters rose so high that all of the tallest mountains on the whole earth were covered by water.  This is one verse that is brought up in the argument of whether or not the flood was a universal global flood or just a local flood that covered that region where all the people resided. 

 

Today, our tallest mountains are, of course, the Himalayan Mountains with Mt. Everest at 29,035 feet – that would take a lot of water to cover.  According to the Institute for Creation Research, the flood didn’t have to rise that high, because the Himalayan Mountains didn’t exist before the flood.  They were actually formed by the flood.  However, the National Center for ScienceEducation argues that the geological evidence does not support the idea that there was a global flood.

 

Whether this was only a local flood, or it was, in fact, a global flood, the point of this passage in scripture is that God was wiping clean his creation.  The only humans to survive this event were those eight people closed up in the ark, who listened when God commanded them to build a boat.