On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the ungodly antediluvians were supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the residence of Job,[105] was supposed to mark the position of the pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the cities of the plain. Some of the dates assigned to the book of Job would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that to which _he_ refers: "The _Rephaim_ tremble from beneath The waters and their inhabitants. Sheol is naked before him, And destruction hath no covering." The word _Rephaim_ here has been variously rendered "shades of the dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.) inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian giants.[106] It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken into Noah's ark, but only a selection, the character of which is clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting of the ark, the disappearance of all visible shore, and the sounding fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler of the book.