How many people died in Noah’s flood? What was the pre-flood population?
Only Eight People Didn’t Die
The Bible tells us that only eight people were saved from drowning in the flood that occurred in Genesis (1 Peter 3:20). The eight survivors that rode out the flood on the ark included Noah and his wife, along with his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives (Genesis 7:13). So if only eight people were saved in Noah’s flood, as some refer to the worldwide event, then how many died?
All Living Things Died
(Genesis 7:21) says all the living things on earth died including birds, domestic animals, wild animals, small animals that scurry along the ground, and all the people. No specific number count is given in the Scriptures as to what the world population was prior to the flood. When doing research on the subject of what the world population was at this time in history you will find numerous ways people have attempted to calculate the number of humans on the earth before the flood.
Pre-Flood Estimates Of The World Population: 2 to 10 Billion
Most start with the biblical knowledge that God created Adam and Eve to begin with. From these two in the beginning, the different growth formulas usually attempt to take into consideration things such as the birthrates and long lifespans of the people who lived during the 1656 years between Adam and Eve and the flood. Some people also factor in beliefs that the world at that time could have been ravaged by diseases and wars that helped to keep the population down. All of these educated guesses leads to very wide-ranging population estimates from as low as 2 billion to as high as 10 billion.
While these are again just educated guesses, they are nevertheless some very sobering numbers to think about when we consider the current population of the earth to be over 7.6 billion. So many people who will once again not be ready for the coming judgement.
(Luke 17:26-30) “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all. “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. “It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed.
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I work in mining, BIG open pit, and there are areas in surrounding mountains that look exactly the same as how we are reshaping the mountains around our mining operations today. If the flood wiped out those miners, or if their mining had ended even 1000s of years before the flood, then the effects of the flood on that area would be just like it looks. There is a large, perfectly flat area, and that is the man-made area that resembles what we are doing today with modern machinery, filling in large valleys between mountain peaks, but one area of the flat area includes a ‘wash’ where flood waters could have eroded that physical feature. That area is flat, while nothing else around it is, exactly as we are doing today, filling in valleys. So I think they was lots of people AND they had advanced civilizations that included some sort of mining.