The Rocks Don’t Lie, by David R. Montgomery – review

This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale.

David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of his discipline from Aristotle to plate tectonics, showing how geological thinking has always been shaped by the great narrative of Noah’s flood. It is a grand tale, and told with verve and excitement. Montgomery also entertainingly surveys the archaeological and literary evidence for ancient Middle Eastern floods — each of which has been acclaimed, in turn, as ‘Noah’s’.

The major theological puzzle wasn’t that Genesis described the deluge as having lasted both 40 and 150 days. The big debate was whether the flood was a local or global affair. Translation hadn’t helped. St Jerome rendered the Hebrew eretz, meaning ‘land’ or ‘soil’, as terra — which was in turn translated into English as ‘earth’.