Did they find Noah's Ark?

It would be pretty crazy if they found Noah's ark, but these are hardly unbiased observers (not that this makes them bad people; merely biased). For all we know, it's just some random temple or other building constructed on top of a mountain. Before we go nuts defending it or refuting it, why don't we wait until it appears in the appropriate literature?

laptoppop said:

Actually it comes from the story itself - Noah was 500 years old when he received the command from the Lord, and 600 years old when he and his family went into the ark.

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Isn't that how old he was when the kids were born? It doesn't say he was warned about the flood then.

To me it does, through the use of the word "all",

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To understand the meaning of 'all' we need to look at the context, which in the case of the flood was the land (erets) Noah lived in.

the covering of the mountains (including the mountains where it landed - many thousands of feet high),

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I think there are real difficulties understanding what 'the hills of Ararat'. Mount Ararat wasn't know by that name until long after the bible was written. The word Ararat is used later in the bible for the kingdom of Urartu centred around lake Van, but then again, the kingdom of Urartu stretched as far as the Mediterranean.

The big problem is that the Kingdom of Urartu only existed from 1000 BC, long after the time of Noah or even Moses, which is why the other references to Ararat are in 2Kings, Jeremiah and Isaiah.

This leaves us not knowing where the hills of Ararat really are. Urartu was the Assyrian for hill country. Or Ararat may come from the Hebrew for 'cursed'. So we are told the ark came to rest in the hill hills (so good they named it twice) or in the cursed hills, a good description of the land after a flood, but it doesn't tell us where, or how high the ark was.

taking all the animals on board to preserve the various types, etc.

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An extensive flood could wipe out many unique species as well as all domesticated breeds.

I appreciate your talking about "under the heavens" and "heavens" etc. but in this case I think the context is pretty darn compelling. You can disagree -- that's fine.

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Try reading it through early bronze age eyes, understanding the terms as they meant to the people of that time.

I typically don't just cite these articles, but here's an example article with various reasons that the flood is seen as global: http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=print&ID=440

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Obviously I can't deal with this point by point and many have already been dealt with, but to take one of the points:

Henry Morris said:

2 The Physical Causes for the Flood. The Bible explains that the breaking open of "all the fountains of the great deep" and the "windows of heaven" (7:11) were the primary causes. The "deep" is the ocean; thus the "great deep" could hardly be the cause of a limited local flood. The "windows" seem to refer to the "waters above the (atmospheric) firmament" (1:7). These were global causes, producing a global effect.

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Actually the deep can also refer to the depths of the earth, especially talking about springs of water gushing up from the deep. I'm using Young's here because it shows the Hebrew words better.
Deut 8:7 For Jehovah thy God is bringing thee in unto a good land, a land of brooks of waters, of fountains, and of depths coming out in valley and in mountain: (we have a differnt word for fountain here, but that doesn't make any difference.)
Psalm 78:15 He cleaveth rocks in a wilderness, And giveth drink--as the great deep.
Now while the deep can be land or sea, the word fountain refers to a spring or water source on land. The Hebrew says the opposite of what Morris claims.

Of course, I'm not sure I agree, but Chuck Missler and others talk about the strange little verses about the "sons of God" and the daughters of men -- they see it as a satanic/demonic attempt to pollute the species such that man would be unredeemable, and the bloodline of the messiah would be ruined. Interesting perspective. If true, a worldwide flood and destruction of the corrupted (gene pool?) makes more sense.

-lee-

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That is I am afraid, conjecture built on conjecture. We don't know that 'sons of God' passage is talking about angels actually breeding with humans and Jesus statement about angels not marrying seems to contradict it. The idea that it was a Satanic plot to pollute the messianic bloodline is unsupported by scripture which tells us the reason was the women were so pretty. Then you have a further conjecture that the reason God sent the flood was to keep the gene pool pure. That is not the reason given in the bible. I think you are right to be cautious about it.

One thing I find interesting -- the story of the Ark goes into deep details, such as the exact measurements. This would seem to me to be able to be used to support that it was at the least believed to be a historical account, as opposed to a story.

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The Lord of the Rings is far more deeply detailed than the Bible, but that doesn't make it a historical account as opposed to a story.

laptoppop said:

Right. But that, combined with estimates of the size of the construction project (millions of board feet of wood) come out consistently that it would take something on that order of magnitude to build the Ark, unless he hired a bunch of outside help.

One thing I find interesting -- the story of the Ark goes into deep details, such as the exact measurements. This would seem to me to be able to be used to support that it was at the least believed to be a historical account, as opposed to a story.

I'll have to check out the Hebrew -- I believe in Gen 8:4 the translation is better rendered "mountains" not "hills". Certainly the NASB and NKJV and even the Tanakh translations all render it as "mountains".
-lee-

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Numbers had important symbolic meaning to the Hebrews (and many other ancient cultures).

40 has extreme significance in the Bible. 40 years wandering in the wilderness for the rebellious Israelites, 40 days of temptation in the desert for Jesus, etc.

30 might have significance as the age a Jew traditionally takes on his job/ministry: Jesus began His ministry at the age of 30.

50, I'm not too sure. When one of the kings sent his men to capture Elijah (Elisha?) he sent them in companies of 50. Companies of 50 would be the general military arrangement AFAIK. Not sure how significant that would be.

300 and 600 I'm not too sure. 1200 might have some significance as *12* x 100.

Why?

Bear in mind also that the Hebrews reused letters as numbers, having no separate symbols. It would be a bit as if I wrote "1246" as "abdf" (although not quite that simple). Perhaps there is some significance there. There is a branch of Jewish interpretive theology called gematriyot, based exclusively on the numerology of certain significant words in Hebrew. I doubt that's what you're looking for, though.

laptoppop said:

Totally fair. I'm aware of significance for 3, 5, 7, 10, and 12. Does anyone know if 30, 40, 50, 300, and 600 have any particular significance?

-lee-

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I'm not really up on numerology, so a more knowledgeable person can give you a more explicit answer. But keep in mind that many numbers achieve greater significance if they can be represented as the products of other significant numbers. Many numbers and measurements in Revelation, for example, are the product of 12 and some other number. As to the dimensions of Noah's Ark, the amount of time spent in it, etc., I don't know.

Actually, I do know that 40 is a significant number, by itself. But I don't know about the others.

jereth said:

God simply created a miraculous force field around the local flood, so that the water rose up to 13 thousand feet without spilling over into the rest of the world. At the end of the flood, God released the force field so that the waters flowed out and the level dropped back to normal.

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Now that you mention it, there's ample biblical support that God did exactly this! See:

2 The Physical Causes for the Flood. The Bible explains that the breaking open of "all the fountains of the great deep" and the "windows of heaven" (7:11) were the primary causes. The "deep" is the ocean; thus the "great deep" could hardly be the cause of a limited local flood. The "windows" seem to refer to the "waters above the (atmospheric) firmament" (1:7). These were global causes, producing a global effect.

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Actually, the use of the language "great deep" enhances the argument that the flood was local. The "deep" was a part of the Hebrew mythological cosmology -- a massive body of water shut under the earth (below sheol itself). It is part and parcel of the mythological cosmology that has a flat earth and solid firmament of heaven.

Given this mythological cosmology, it is wrong to read the flood account in a scientific manner. Read in its cultural context, the accounts says nothing whatsoever of a flood encircling the entire extent of a spherical planet earth.

laptoppop said:

I'll have to check out the Hebrew -- I believe in Gen 8:4 the translation is better rendered "mountains" not "hills". Certainly the NASB and NKJV and even the Tanakh translations all render it as "mountains".
-lee-

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Translations are largely subject to the biases of the translators. Most English versions use "mountains" because of the general Christian bias towards a worldwide flood. This same bias leads to erets being translated "earth" rather than "land" throughout the flood narrative. But the fact is, in Hebrew there is one word for "hill" and "mountain", and erets much more commonly refers to a regional area rather than the whole earth.

Try to read the flood narrative, replacing all occurences of "earth" with "land", and "mountains" with "hills". You'll be amazed at how different the story sounds. And before you cry "foul", this is an entirely legitimate exercise. In the Hebrew language, the words are totally interchangable. We need to transcend our English bibles, with their biases, and look afresh at the originally inspired texts.

There is a really simple little math problem you can do to see just how difficult it is to justify the concept of a "global flood".

Let's say that the highest mountains of the world were in fact covered by water during the flood, and that these mountains have not changed in height since before the flood (since there is nothing in the Bible that says or implies that geography was changed by the flood).

That would mean that enough water had to flood the earth to cover Mt. Everest, at a height of just slightly over 29,000 feet (8848 meters).

Thus, a flood over over 29000 feet in depth covered the entire world. Couldn't be less in some places and more in others. Has to be level all around.

Now, it's fairly simple to calculate how much volume this water would take up. A conservative way to do it (neglecting the change in surface area from earth surface to top of the flood surface) is to figure out the volume of one square kilometer of water at a depth of 8848 meters, or 8.8 kilometers. Then, multiply this result by the total surface area of the earth.

Obviously, the volume of 1 square kilometer of water at this depth gives a volume of 8.8 cubic kilometers, or 88,000,000,000 cubic meters. The total surface area of the earth is 510,065,600 square kilometers, so the total volume of water needed to flood the earth (conservatively figured) is 4488577280 cubic kilometers, or 4,488,577,280,000,000,000 cubic meters.

Where did all this water go? It isn't in the oceans, because the oceans all must have existed prior to the flood. It's not in the polar caps, obviously, they're far too small to account for all that water. So where did it go?

The creationist solution, of course, was that the earth was a whole flatter before the flood. If the highest mountain on the earth was a mere, say, 500 meters, we wouldn't need 4.5 x 10^9 cubic kilometers to submerge everything.

Of course, that solution is a complete speculation, has no Biblical basis (other than the demands of a particular hermeneutic that a global flood must have happened somehow or other for the Bible to be true), and makes the "duties" of the Flood even worse - not only does it have to exhibit multiple varieties of sedimentation at different sites and fossilize layered animal prints and burrows, it (or whatever caused it) now has to cause a few km of mountain uplift, without any clue of how it happened after 50 years of tectonic science. And it has to do all this within less than a year. This type of hyperaccelerated tectonism strikes me as being even more absurd than postdiluvean hyperevolution ... and very telling given that (AFAIK) 40 years ago creationists didn't even want to believe in plate tectonics.