Clearly the Bible writers gathered in events, mythologies, prevailing stories, etc and build a symbolic telling of moral and spiritual truths held in a matrix of real world events. There were or was no doubt a catastrophic flood, but surely nobody can claim the Flood of Noah as a real event. On every level of investigation this is an utterly impossible story.
There is some evidence of the Black Sea flooding. There is evidence for some great cataclysm that took place some 12,000 that could still have echos within the Bible stories. It is still a part of Aboriginal sing-song history telling about when the waters over took them on the coastline of Australia and forced them off their lands inland.
So there are real events that get woven into these stories and exaggerated to give them greater impact. Noah was a Teacher who had 40 days and 40 nights rain, that is 40 years of revelation. He formed a covenant with God that whomsoever joined Him in this covenant would be protected from the onslaught of self and passion, they would enter the spiritual Ark and be safe from a flood of sin and materialism.
I have no idea why when the Bible is about elevating the human spirit that the Christians reduce the meaning to nonsensical literal stories that defy reason, logic and common sense.
