Imagine how Mr. and Mrs. Noah must have felt in that time just before the Flood!
How dif. cult and frighten- ing to be a tiny minority of eight righteous people in a completely evil, heavily populated world! But I’m encouraged by this! Since God carefully provided for only eight righteous people, how much more He cares for us—His Son’s Bride—in today’s wicked world! Gen 6:5, 11-12 (Amp): The Lord saw that man’s wickedness was great in the earth; that every imagination and every intention of all human thinking was only evil continually.
The earth was depraved and putrid in God’s sight, and the land was . lled with violence, desecration, infringement, out-
rage, assault, and lust for power. God saw how degenerate, debased, and vicious the world was, for all humanity had corrupted their way upon the earth and lost their true direction.
William T. Pelletier, Ph.D., “The Bible-Science Guy” is a mathematician who has spent over 45 years researching Bi-
ble-Science topics; specializing in explaining scienti. c issues Biblically. Using information on children listed, age spans and population formulas, Dr. Pelletier has estimated the number of people who died in Noah's . ood to be 10,299,681,562,500-
over ten trillion! Noah and his family were certainly in the minority!
For your consideration, here’s how Dr. Pelletier estimated this number: “Scripture records data on the children of ten families immediately after the Flood, useful for estimating pre-Flood family statistics. Noah’s three sons had at least sixteen sons among them. Seven of Noah’s grandsons had at least thirty-eight sons; progeny of the other nine grandsons is unrecorded.
Thus, ten families immediately following the Flood had at
least . fty-four sons and presumably about the same number
of daughters (usually not mentioned), thereby averaging at least 10.8 children per family. (Genesis 10; 11:10-13).
Based on this data, I will assume for estimation purposes the average pre-Flood family had ten children. This estimate is likely low because men lived long; many produced chil-
dren through . ve-hundred years of age. If a family started
at age twenty and had a child every two or three years to age . ve-hundred, each could easily have produced more than
two-hundred children.
A generation today is about thirty-. ve years. In pre-Flood lon-
gevity, the average generation would have been about ninety years. Genesis 5 lists ten generations in the 1,656 years before the Flood, from Adam to Noah. One family could realistically have produced many generations in this period; I’m using a conservative estimate of eighteen for the average number of generations in family lines before the Flood. It was probably much higher.
To calculate an estimate of how the population grew from Adam and Eve to the Flood in 1,656 years, I’m assuming an average lifespan of nine-hundred years; an average of ten chil-
dren per family averaging . ve boys and . ve girls that grow
to adulthood and marry; eighteen generations on average, and ten generations in an average life span. Most of these estimates are probably pretty good except for the average number of children in a family. I think it was probably much higher.
To this must be added the unmarried childless people; a very conservative estimate of 8% of the reproducing population. This gives a total estimated population at the Flood of 10,299,681,562,500. This corresponds to a growth rate of 1.783%.” This compares to a current growth rate of 0.4% for the US. (For a complete look at Dr. Pelletier’s formulas, visit: biblescienceguy.wordpress.com) Ultimately we can’t know positively how many people died
in the . ood that was sent to cleanse the earth of rampant sin.
What we can know for sure is that God is always good, and He always loves, protects and provides for His children. The earth is designed to accommodate humanity. We don’t have to fear overpopulation.
In. nite Grace Ministries teaches freedom from anxiety by fo-
cusing on the limitless love and mercy of God.
