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The scenario he proposes would certainly have had global effects.
as for your response to his hyperbole (10 Billion Hydrogen bombs) it is equally theoretical...I actually think if something that huge literally happened there would be no more planet
It sounds like there are already some places of agreement, such as the idea that the literal description of a solid dome doesn't have to mean that there was literally a solid dome.
This seems like another point of agreement. A literal reading places the flood at around 2450 BC, well within historic times. So it is a non-literal reading that is needed to put it in pre-historic time.
This part too is likely non-literal. There are many reasons that "all humanity" was not destroyed, including the lack of a genetic bottleneck, the large number of alleles in many loci, and so on.
Hi...
Just wondering how many fellow TE'ers out there have moved away from the idea of a flood all together.
I recognise it as nothing but "true myth", to borrow the term from CS Lewis.
If I understand A.N.E. cosmology, the dome was solid, and there were waters above it. When the noahic flood happened, this dome literally broke (in other words, their entire universe shattered) and there was a global flood.
I think in proper context, that the way the bible describes the flood cannot be taken literally, and a "local flood" is just a wishy washy toned down literalism... and doesn't go far enough to solve the problems we have biblically with a large scale flood.
Can we just accept it as mythology and move on from here?
But what kind of a record is it?
Because it is told in cosmic terms and there is no record of any actual flood of such dimensions.
As Papias points out, as told in Genesis, it happened in historic times. There are archeological records of literate civilizations which go back much further than the apparent time of the flood. One of the evidences that the flood could not have destroyed all but Noah's family is that there is no interruption in the written records of these civilizations, no indication that they were ever destroyed or that these civilizations needed to be rebuilt again.
Ask my parrot, I'm often quite serious.Assyrian you can't be serious (of course not, you are Assyrian)...
What were the deeps (same word tehom) the Lord promised the Israelites in the Land he was giving them?"The deep" has nothing to do with artesian wells..."teh-hom" means the deep, depths, deep places, abyss, the deep sea, subterranean waters, abysses, primeval ocean, the grave and so on...imagine this scripture...and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the artesian well...fountains can be springs but these were of the great (much or very) deep not the ones on the surface of our world (two different categories of springs altogether)...
It is a kind of its own. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit,uses simple storytelling like a myth,but also mentions the exact dimentions of the ark,and Noah's children are shown to be the ancestors of later biblical persons and nations of "historical" times.
It is only cosmic insofar as it mentions the dome of the sky.
And the story itself is a record. It is disingenuous to say that there is no record for an event that you know about from a story intended as a record.
Genesis does not say when the flood happened,and it does not say that there were civilizations at the time of the flood.
If civilation did exist,I have read in the Catholic Commentary of Holy Scripture (1953) that there was an interruption of civilization and that that there is evidence of great floods from 4000 B.C.
All of this (other than the inspiration of the Holy Spirit) is consistent with the same literary forms used by other cultures in the Ancient Near East. We attribute these stories to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but that doesn't change their genre and method of narration. It doesn't change them into reportage like that of a journalist or historian.
No, it is cosmic in that it presents a destruction of "every living thing" on the face of the earth (or land). "He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left of those with him on the ark." Gen. 7:21 And later it traces all human peoples to Noah and his sons. There would be no point to those genealogies if the people formerly inhabiting those lands had not been completely destroyed and left no descendants.
In what sense? What do we have that tells us the intention of the story? Our best indication is Gen. 6:5 but that is part of the story too, so only provides the set up for the rest of the story.
Yes it does suggest the existence of civilizations. Right back in the story of Adam and Eve, you have reference to agriculture. Gen. 4:17 tells us that Cain founded a city and named it for his first son, Enoch. vs. 20-22 tells us of the three sons of Lamech who founded arts associated with civilization, including the use of bronze and iron. The flood story itself speaks of domesticated animals.
Local floods, yes. Leonard Wooley found a flood plain interrupting Sumerian civilization around that time with ruins of cities both above and below it. But there is no indication that flood touched Palestine or Syria or Egypt. There are other floods that did, of course, but they did not destroy Sumer. So there is no complete disruption of civilization even in the areas known to the biblical writers, much less globally.
Such a local flood could have been the historical root of a story such as we find in the Gilgamesh epic and its parallels, including scripture. But while that would root these stories in a historical event, the stories as told are not an accurate record of the events. They are stories inspired by the event not records of the event. Indeed, the story need not refer to any particular event at all.
Well, the flood recorded in the Sumerian stories happened around 3,000 BC. The Bible's flood could have been the same one. It fits the known culture. The Bible even remembers that the ark was made of reeds. If it was a local flood, as indicated by Peter, then it could have been a real event. There is nothing then stopping it from being a historical account, and still teaching the spiritual lessons.
As I said, such a local flood could have been the seed of inspiration for the flood story. But what we have in scripture is still a story about a great flood of the same sort as the other flood stories found in related cultures. It is not in any sense a historical account of the Sumerian flood or any other.
There are so many great floods that cultures remember, the flooding of Doggerland, the tsunami from the Storegga slide, the drowning of the Black Sea, the sea level rise from the end of the Ice Age that flooded the temples in India. When cultures remember these sort of floods, we tend to falsely lump them with Noah's Flood.
The accuracy it portrays the flood plain type of flood of Sumer makes it more historical than you want to believe.
My point is that a story about a flood, even if the inspiration for it was a historical flood, is not a historical record of the flood. Naturally, any people will tell a story in terms of what they are familiar with--and the people of Mesopotamia were familiar with that type of flood.
I agree 100%. Floods are not uncommon, whether by rivers, lakes, seas or oceans. So ancient floods will be remembered in the stories people tell. The commonality of flood stories does not justify the idea of only a single flood.
It is a matter of emphasis. My point is that a story about a flood, even if the inspiration for it was a historical flood, is not a historical record of the flood. Naturally, any people will tell a story in terms of what they are familiar with--and the people of Mesopotamia were familiar with that type of flood. If they had been living on the west coast of North America, they would have told a story consistent with an ocean storm such as a tsunami instead and possibly referred to the ark as a great canoe.
Neither type of story takes away from a historic reality; but neither is a reliable historical record either.
Indeed,the distinction of story/history is a fairly recent one that did not exist when these stories were first told. So we simply cannot put a lot of weight on the historical background from which they came.
That said, I agree with your earlier analysis of the fit between the biblical story and a flood-plain type of flood. And I agree that there is no bar to using historical events to teach spiritual lessons. But we also need to understand the ancient way of using historical events was not to record the event as such, but to develop a story loosely based on the event. The emphasis is less on what happened than on why.
The problem is that the Bible remembers things that more recent storytellers had forgotten. By 1,000 BC, the reed boats were forgotten. The building of ziggurats with bricks and tar for mortar wasn't used in Egypt or Canaan. Would they have put in Nimrod in a more recent version? Or the fact that Sumer was empty after the flood?
Who forgot about reed boats? Who would omit Nimrod? I am not clear which set of storytellers (biblical/non-biblical) you are attributing these actions to.
The Bible does mention Nimrod, but not Sumer (or any other city relative to the flood). And I find it difficult in light of their experience in Egypt to think of either the Egyptians or the Israelites being unfamiliar with bricks or tar.
Finally, let us not forget the role of travellers in spreading stories. Some things no doubt, were done differently in Mesopotamia than in Canaan or Egypt, but Canaan also lay on the major trade-route from Mesopotamia to Egypt. So they were not isolated from that culture and its heroes or traditions.
Well, it uses Shinar for Sumer, a decent transliteration of the original, just as Sumer is the English transliteration. Sargon conquered cities in almost exactly the same way as described in the Bible. Sumerian was the only language spoken in Sumer until after the great flood of the Sumerians. A few centuries later, the Sumerians were starting to build Ziggurats with bricks and tar, and Semitic speakers invaded, and languages became confused.
What buildings in Egypt were built with bricks and tar for mortar?
One can see a lot of Sumerian ties. There is also the correlation between the king visiting the Heirodule, the priestess who was his "spiritual" bride, breaking the marriage covenant, and both praying to be inhabited by the god/goddess, breaking the spiritual covenant with God. This fits the Sons of God visiting the daughters of men. So much of the story of Noah, and the surrounding details fits the facts of Sumer 3,000 BC, that one can see the History. You can claim that it was not historical, but all you are left with is the details, like the man was named Noah and he had three sons. The spiritual lessons are more apt for Sumer of 3,000 BC than for Babylon of 500 BC
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