Explore 9 questions and answers about Flood and Tower of Babel, answered by Dr. Robert Sungenis.
I take the flood of Noah to be a real historical event and a universal one, not a regional inundation that later got told as though it were the whole world. That is the reading the text supports and it is the reading the Fathers held, and I set it out verse by verse in the fourth volume of the Catholic Apologetics Study Bible, which is a word-for-word translation and commentary on Genesis 1 to 11.
The argument that decides it for me is the mountain. Genesis has the ark coming to rest on Ararat, and the physics of water standing that high does not permit a local event: water finds its level, so a flood deep enough to float a ship onto that range is a flood covering the mountains everywhere. The numbers are not prohibitive either. The water presently in the oceans, spread evenly over the surface, would stand somewhere between eleven and sixteen thousand feet deep. Ararat's highest peak today is 16,916 feet.
There is a second reason, and it is about purpose rather than hydraulics. A local flood defeats the point of the ark. If the waters covered only one region, the animals outside that region survive anyway and there is no reason to build anything, let alone to gather creatures onto it. The narrative only makes sense if what it says happened is what happened.
Babel follows from the same chapters and is usually read out of order. Genesis 10 lists where the nations ended up; Genesis 11 explains why they scattered. The table of nations is the consequence, not the prelude. Ruins identified with the tower still stand in Mesopotamia, at Birs Nimrud, though I am careful in the commentary about how much weight any particular identification can carry.
The questions below work through both accounts: the scale of the flood, the ark itself, the genealogies and the dispersal of the nations that came after.