After sixteen hundred years of human history, mankind had become so corrupt that God determined to destroy all of the human race except for Noah and his family. Gen. 6:5-8 reads, “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually- And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at Ws heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”
When God sent a flood that covered the earth, it changed the entire geography of the earth and destroyed every air-breathing creature on earth, (“all in whose nostrils was the breath of life” Gen. 7:22). Only Noah, and his wife, and his three sons and their wives, and the creatures Noah took into the ark, escaped. When Noah and his family stepped out of the ark one year later, they stepped out into an empty earth. Those eight people were the only people on earth. God told them to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Gen. 9:2). It fell to Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, and their sixteen sons to repopulate the earth, and that is what they did. Those three sons of Noah and their wives came out of the ark after the flood and made homes for themselves. Then their sons, these sixteen grandsons of Noah, fanned out over the earth and established the various nations of the ancient world.
Those sixteen men were the ancestors of the entire human race, and it is simply mind-boggling to examine the amount of evidence left us as to their individual existence and identity. Again bear in mind that we are talking about sixteen individuals who lived over four thousand years ago. That is a time so remote that historians lose entire empires. Historians finally rediscovered the Hittite Empire only during the last century, and archaeologists are still discovering the shattered remains of civilizations they are completely unable to identify. Perhaps God left us such a legacy of proof with regard to those men for the purpose of stopping the mouths of skeptics, who are so fond of ridiculing the Bible. Skeptics in every age have insisted that the Bible is a book of myths and legends, but God has left us all the evidence we need to prove that those characters really lived, that they were who the Bible says they were, and that the names the Bible provides were their exact names.
We will only have time and space to take a brief look at each of these men, and the evidence regarding them, but we believe that it will be sufficient to demonstrate in a concise way the nations that developed from them. One important fact which secular historians rarely mention is that when the European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began to travel to the remote corners of the earth, wherever they went, they found primitive cultures who were still talking about the Genesis Flood. For the most part, those people had no written language. They did not have books, magazines, nor newspapers. There was no written record of the flood, but they were still talking about it. How could it have happened that they still knew about the flood literally thousands of years after the fact? They did not have books, and newspapers, and radio, and television; so they had an abundance of time to talk to each other. Before all of our modern advancements people communicated with each other on an individual basis more than we ever have since. For four thousand years those primitive, unlettered people sat around in the evening and told each other tales of long ago, and the most often repeated story was about a world-destroying flood, and the one man and his family who survived to repopulate the new world. That was the most momentous event in the history of the world up until their time, and cultures all over the world were fascinated by the story. For four thousand years they could not stop telling it.
Wherever the explorers traveled, they found natives repeating that story. And wherever the story was told, the basic facts were always very similar. Whether it was the Gilgamesh Epic of the Babylonians or another version told by American Indians, or another version told by the Polynesians of the South Pacific, the main storyline was always the same. Mankind had violated the law of his God; his disobedience brought a world-destroying flood, and only one man and his family escaped. One story had the ark shaped like a cigar; one had it shaped like a cube; another story allowed that the ark had nine stories. The details varied, but the basic facts were always the same: a violated law, a world-destroying flood, a huge boat, and one man and his family who survived to populate the new world. Skeptics can ridicule the Bible, but they have no explanation of why (if the Genesis Flood did not happen) primitive cultures all over the world — cultures which had no contact with each other — pass that legend down for four thousand years. What was the source of the legend if it never happened?