Pre-Flood And Post-Flood Places Refutes A Global Flood?

Pre-Flood And Post-Flood Places Refute A Global Flood? 

Bodie Hodge, M.Sc., B.Sc., PEI

Biblical Authority Ministries, May 22, 2025 (Donate) 

Pre-flood and post-Flood places by the same name—does this refute a global flood that should have destroyed such places? When we read in Scripture in Genesis 6-9, it is obvious there was a global Flood. So the alleged contradiction is with regards to names that were pre-Flood and suddenly reappear after the Flood. 

My wife in Hannibal, Missouri which is ultimately named for an ancient Carthaginian General Hannibal Barca (the city gets its name from the former Hannibal Creek, which was named for Hannibal Barca). 

For example, Table 1 illustrates some of the most common ones: 

Table 1 Pre-Flood and Post-Flood Name References 

Name	Bible Reference Pre-Flood	Bible reference Post-Flood	Person
Havilah	Genesis 2:11	Genesis 10:7 Genesis 10:29	Noah’s grandson through Ham; Noah’s great, great, great, great grandson through Shem.
Cush	Genesis 2:13	Genesis 10:6	Noah’s grandson through Ham
Asshur	Genesis 2:14	Genesis 10:22	Noah’s grandson through Shem
Tigris	Genesis 2:14	Daniel 10:4	River in modern-day Iraq
Euphrates	Genesis 2:14	Genesis 15:18	River in modern-day Iraq

The answer to this quite simple, but let’s do some illustrations so we can better understand this: 

1. Names of places often transfer. For example, Versailles, IL was named for Versailles, KY when settlers moved from these regions of Kentucky into Illinois. But Versailles, Kentucky was named for Versailles, France. If someone said to meet me in Versailles—you may have to ask “which one?”
2. Names of places often come from names of people as well. The land of Canaan was named form Noah’s grandson Canaan. St Louis, MO was obviously named for a person named Louis. 
3. Names of people sometimes came from places. Consider the name London that many people today have and its origin as a city in England. 

Names of people and places often overlap. In Genesis, the first city that was named was named for a grandson of Adam named Enoch (Genesis 4:17). So, a city, i.e., a place, was called by the name of a person. 

With this in mind, it should be fairly easy to see how names could easily have been transferred through the Flood. The land of Havilah was passed along through the knowledge of Noah and his family became a name of Ham’s grandson. Cush was Ham’s son, and Asshur was Shem’s son.  

Noah, Ham, and Shem lived before the Flood and would have been aware of these regions (or even the people some of these regions might have originally been named for!). And of course, these names have gone on to become names of regions where some of these people settled after the Tower of Babel and their descendants thrived. 

Cush, for instance, is modern-day Ethiopia, Asshur was where Assyria developed into a great nation, and so on.      

Consider for a moment if I were to say the “Thames River”, most people would quickly think of a river in southern England. However, Connecticut also has a river named Thames and Ontario, Canada does too. 

When people settled in the Americas from Europe, they named some of these rivers for rivers with which they were previously familiar.  Why would we expect the Noah and his descendants to do any less. 

The Tigris and Euphrates of today, in modern day Iraq were named for the famous headwaters in the Garden of Eden. So there is no contradiction, but merely a situation of renaming new places, rivers, and people with previously used names.