“The seventh chapter of Genesis is but another version of the first. Thus, while the latter reads: “…and darkness was upon the face of the deep; And the spirit (of God) moved upon the face of the waters”, in chapter seventh, it is said: “…and the waters prevailed…and the ark went (with Noah – the spirit) upon the face of the waters.” Thus, Noah, if the Chaldean Nuah, is the spirit vivifying matter, chaos, represented by the deep or waters of the flood.
In the Babylonian legend it is Istar (Astoreth, the moon) which is shut up in the ark and sends out a dove (emblem of Venus and other lunar goddesses) in search of dry land. And whereas in the Semitic tablets it is Xisuthrus or Hasisadra who is “translated to the company of the gods for his piety”, in the Bible it is Enoch who walks with, and being taken up by God, “was no more.”
The successive existence of an incalculable number of worlds before the subsequent evolution of our own, was believed and taught by all the ancient peoples. The punishment of the Christians for despoiling the Jews of their records and refusing the true key to them began from the earliest centuries. And thus is it that we find the holy Fathers of the Church laboring through an impossible chronology and the absurdities of literal interpretation, while the learned rabbis were perfectly aware of the real significance of their allegories. So not only in the Sohar, but also in other kabalistic works accepted by Talmudists, such as Midrash Berasheth, or the universal Genesis, which, with the Merkaba (the chariot of Ezekiel), composes the Kabala, may be found the doctrine of a whole series of worlds evolving out of the chaos, and being destroyed in succession.
The Hindu doctrines teach of two Pralayas or dissolutions: one universal, the Maha-Pralaya, the other partial, or the minor Pralaya. This does not relate to the universal dissolution which occurs at the end of every “Day of Brahma”, but to the geological cataclysms at the end of every minor cycle of our globe. This historical and purely local deluge of Central Asia, the traditions of which can be traced in every country, and which, according to Bunsen, happened about the year 10,000 B.C., had naught to do with the mythical Noah, or Nuah. A partial cataclysm occurs at the close of every “age” of the world, they say, which does not destroy the latter, but only changes its general appearance. New races of men and animals and a new flora evolve from the dissolution of the precedent ones.
The allegories of the “fall of man” and the “deluge”, are the two most important features of the Pentateuch. They are, so to say, the Alpha and Omega, the highest and the lowest keys of the scale of harmony on which resounds the majestic hymns of the creation of mankind; for they discover to him who questions the Zura (figurative Gematria), the process of man’s evolution from the highest spiritual entity unto the lowest physical – the post-diluvian man, as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, every sign of the picture writing which cannot be made to fit within a certain circumscribed geometrical figure may be rejected as only intended by the sacred hierogrammatist for a premeditated blind – so many of the details in the Bible must be treated on the same principle, that portion only being accepted which answers to the numerical methods, taught in the Kabala.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 