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→Historicity of the text
== Historicity of the text ==
Creationists and biblical literalists tend to recognize this passage as historical and historically accurate. Proofs from Tradition and from the words of the Old and New Testament give credit to some historicity of the account, but many varying opinions have grown to speculate on the why's and how's of the Deluge.
The main two categories of interpretation are the global flood theory and the local flood theory. The first exegetical school teaches that a catastrophic world-wide submersion of the dry lands really occured, so that no survivors escaped the cataclysm except for those on the Ark. The second position states that either humanity was concentrated in Mesopotamia so that a local flood in the Tigris-Euphrates valley would have wiped out all humans, or on the contrary that by "all the earth" the Bible understands "all the region" requiring the extinction of only one civilization.
