What else is new? Pretty much any myth can be followed back to an older one. Especially Christian ones since the early Christians were really clever at making older traditions their own, thus sucking in more and more people. They had learned this from the Romans. There's a theory that the Flood myth goes back to a time when the Atlantic broke through the Strait of Gibraltar, leveling the Med's sea level with the Atlantic's. The process was extremely fast. Would have looked like a biblical flood. However that's kind of unlikely since that happened around five million years ago. If true it could be some kind of half-esoteric genetic memory from the earliest dawn of mankind or something.
You don't need to go back that far, the end of the last ice age saw massive floods in most parts of the world.
Unlikely, I'm describing a situation in which writings are found which are considered at least if not more reliable than the ones which the early Catholic church compiled as the Bible. I consider it likely that some kind of Jesus figure existed around the time (indeed there seem to have been several similar messiah figures).
There were dozens of men who presented themselves as the Messiah, both before and after Jesus of Nazareth. Some of the stories about Jesus came about as an effort to demonstrate why he was different from the others.
You are not correct. "Almah" can most definitely refer to "a young woman of childbearing age who has not yet had a child, and who may be an unmarried virgin or a married young woman". http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/kjv/almah.html " Definition virgin, young woman of marriageable age maid or newly married ++ There is no instance where it can be proved that this word designates a young woman who is not a virgin. (TWOT) "
My step-brother learned Greek in prison just for this purpose! He did have a lot of free-time on his hands.
I think we should rewrite all dictionaries that way. The following examples taken from dictionary.com's word of the day feature: sessile \ SES-il, -ahyl \ , adjective; 1. Zoology . There is no instance where it can be proved that this word designates an animal who is not permanently attached; not freely moving. 2. Botany . attached by the base, or without any distinct projecting support. There is no instance where it can be proved that this word designates a leaf that is not issuing directly from the stem. lee·way adjective 23. of, pertaining to, or concerned with outer space or deep space: There is no instance where it can be proved that this word designates a mission that is not directed towards space. 24. designed for or suitable to use in the exploration of outer space or deep space: space tools; There is no instance where it can be proved that this word designates food that is not specially packaged for astronauts. tan·ta·lize [tan-tl-ahyz] verb (used with object), tan·ta·lized, tan·ta·liz·ing. to torment with, or as if with, the sight of something desired but outof reach; There is no instance where it can be proved that this word designates a tease other than by arousing expectations that are repeatedly disappointed. We could call it the Defensive Dictionary (tm).
Packard, I am sure you are well aware that that is a bit of a category error there. Bible lexicons and regular dictionaries are not equivalent things and have entirely different purposes.
Do you even read before responding? There is no instance where I stated that this word designates a young woman who is not a virgin. I said that the word itself does not mean virgin. This is true. The word does not make a statement about virginity, but about age.
The February 13th podcast episode has a 40 minute interview with the translator, that's well worth a listen.
Alma is apple in Hungarian, so all y'all are wrong. Also, Alma was the name of Gustav Mahler's wife, and the name of two Book of Mormon prophets, not that the LDS example means much to non-Mormons.
I've been listening to Finkel's book, The Ark Before Noah and am almost done with it. I have to say that it is not for the fainthearted. It is, essentially, a college course on the subject. Finkel first saw the tablet when a gentleman brought it into the British Museum on one of their "Ask an Expert" days. When Finkel read the opening lines, he looked up at the gentleman and told him (basically), "This is perhaps the most important tablet I've ever seen, and it looks to be the oldest version of the Flood myth to ever be discovered." The owner of the tablet said (basically), "Oh, how fascinating." and proceeded to rebox it and left the museum with it. That was in 1985. Finkel, to his credit, kept after the owner to let him see it again, and managed to convince him in 2009. The tablet dates from roughly 2000 BC, but Finkel suspects that the story is probably from around 3000 BC, and is only 60 lines. (Why 60 lines? Because the number 60 was sacred to the Babylonians, that's why.) Finkel's book, after discussing how he found the tablet, moves on to his educational background (he had to learn German and French, because when he was in college there were no dictionaries written for English speakers), a history of the region, and details of the various languages which used cuneiform. It is entertaining, but dense. Finkel goes into a lot of detail about the ancient world, which is good, as you'll need the information later on. He then goes over the various Flood myths from that part of the world, and illustrates quite deftly how they can trace their origins to the tablet which he first saw back in '85 (and calls "The Ark Tablet"). And he also shows how the most likely site that it would have been claimed for the ark to have touched down would have been in the Zagros mountains in modern day Iraq/Iran (though there is another possibility as well). I will say that the audiobook version is great, because its read by Finkel himself, along with Gareth Armstrong. Finkel reads the bulk of the text, with Armstrong handling the quotations from ancient documents. This makes it easy to power through the spots where it gets a little tough, but doesn't help you figure out how some of the words are spelled. I would recommend that no matter what your level of interest you start with the audiobook, and then shift to either an ebook or dead tree edition if you're really fascinated by the subject. I don't blame Finkel for any lags in the work, as there's really no way to accurately discuss the subject matter unless you're certain your audience has the appropriate background info, and Finkel does make it interesting. Finkel's a fan of board games and at one point in The Ark Before Noah describes how he discovered the rules for the Royal Game of Ur, and that because of this, one of his coworkers realized that the scratches on a statue which had been in the museum since the 1800s was a game board for the Royal Game of Ur. (And yes, this does have bearing on the subject of the Flood, but you'll have to read Finkel to find out how.)
since there are stories about great floods in all the myths from ancient greece to india it's pretty much a given that there was one at some point after humans gained the ability to tell stories to the next generation and eventually write them down. it's said the bosporus is only about 7500 years old. the perfect timespan for the collective memory to spin what was certainly a great flood into a whole variety of myths. i'm sure the flood myths are some of the oldest examples of human storytelling. strip them of all the gods and stuff and they might be the oldest examples of factual, written history.
I still doubt any flood myth that entered any historical record was any bigger than a flooded island, or a plain containing a single tribe. Myths tend to translate importance upwards as it is retold.
First, AWESOME thread. Thanks Tuckerfan! Second, there's some amazingly large Ice Age floods. One melting ice sheet was known to pump more fresh water out than 7 times all of the great lakes combined. Luckily for land dwellers it burst into the ocean, but that was enough to slow circulation and alter the climate ni 6200 BC. http://www.livescience.com/873-bursting-ice-dam-flooded-ancient-ocean.html There's been lots of megafloods that we've discovered as the glaciers retreated. The Missoula River floods took out large sections of Washington state. So no, no global flood, but many that could have wiped out entire stone age civilizations have been documented.
The documentary about the book just recently aired, it seems. (Those in the UK or who have access to a VPN service can watch it here on BBC 4's website.) It doesn't appear to be available for us 'Merkins to watch, but I did find the trailer for it on YouTube. Its worth a watch because not only do you get to see the tablet and the methods used to study it, but you get shots of them building the replica of the ark as described in the tablet.
Years back I posted a NOVA video on the Scablands flood, and Dan told me to stop posting creationist nonsense.
The flood myth exists to explain why fossil sea creatures are found up in the mountains, which just about every human culture had to confront and explain one way or another. To people before the post-enlightenment geology came along, a giant flood made more sense than the idea that mountains slowly rose up. Other than that, the myth itself doesn't make sense on any level. If there was enough rain to raise the sea-level by tens of thousands of feet (or even thousands), the water vapor would all have to be in the atmosphere at the same time, otherwise you just have water going round and round and not accomplishing anything. If there was several thousand feet worth of condensible water vapor in the atmosphere, the sea-level atmospheric pressure would be 1,000 to 10,000 psi (for 2,000 to 20,000 feet worth of water). Due to adiabatic compression, the surface temperature would be over a 1,000 degrees F. It would take NASA and the US Navy years to design and build a vessel that could withstand those conditions for a week. A wooden boat wouldn't have a chance in h3ll. Primitive people wouldn't have guessed this. It also makes no theological sense - on any level. Why didn't God just give Noah a boat? Why didn't he use a slightly less stupid method to deal with people who were acting up? Why did Noah need to bother with any animals since God could just remake them just like he did in Genesis? Why did God promise not to do it again? Isn't that acknowledging a horrible mistake? Why would an omniscient being make such a screw up, and why would he apologize for it to a farmer? Serious theologians largely gave up on the literal interpretation shortly after the discovery of the New World, because the idea that American animals swam the Atlantic ocean to get on a boat so they wouldn't drown, just to swim back, was just stupid. And as we found more and more species, it became more and more obvious that the flood story was an old fairy tale. The Koranic version is even weirder, because Noah was the one goading Allah into mass genocide because the locals dissed him. So of course since he's a narcissistic, genocidal religious fanatic, they celebrate him as an esteemed prophet.
When in doubt about the Truth of the Biblical Flood, trust in the Gifted Knowledge & Wisdom of Ken Ham, Kirk Cameron, Ray Comfort, & Carl Baugh!
I wouldn't trust those guy to build a canoe. The world 24-hour record rainfall of 71.8 inches occurred on an island during a tropical cyclone. That only happened by having moisture move quickly in from a vast area and dumped all in basically one spot. 40 days of that would add up to 239 feet - in the one spot. And there are the long acknowledged problems that many animals require special diets, and trees don't walk across continents and oceans very well. Won't someone think of the giant pandas - and the koalas? Plus the freshwater fish/salt water fish problems. God wouldn't touch such a stupid story with a stick, which is okay because Christianity nearly dumped the Old Testament as a pile of Jewish fairy tales, and Christians are used to sorting and sifting. They kept the Old Testament as background material because Christians would've been confused if they started out with the expanded universe but skipped the original series. Unfortunately, when Muhammed (pbuh) went for a darker, grittier reboot, he kept some of the glaring mistakes in the original canon, like Noah and Jar Jar.
I'm just wading into this thread now, but I'd like to point out that "flooding the entire world" probably meant a different thing in a tribal society. If you, your entire village, and everyone within a day's walk (assuming the floodwaters receded fairly quickly) gets inundated, that's a pretty big deal, because you may not have seen much else of the world (and you definitely don't know it's as big as it really is). So arguments about how much water it takes to cover the continents really aren't necessary; the rupture of a glacial dam would be enough.
But then, a day's walk after the flood, you'd run into the neighbors who'd laugh and say "We told you not to live in a flood plain!" Perhaps that situation could have happened earlier in the neolithic, but by the bronze age people were quite well traveled, and the flood stories come out of a geological region of colliding plates where mountains are high and common, and they were very familiar with conventional floods because their crops often depended on them. We know ancient peoples like the Greeks had a fascination with fossils, as they collected dinosaur bones and put them in their temples. It's thought these were taken to be earlier generations of giants (titans and whatnot) and mystical beasts, and were probably the evidentiary basis for their mythologies. Even Judaism and Christianity had stories about huge giants who used to inhabit the Earth (the result of angels having sex with women, which God put a stop to because the giants were eating all the food). If they were looking at the rocks as relics of past life and ancient battles, they'd have to explain fish and clam fossils in the mountains, and Noah's flood and other global flood myths do just that, and that was the scientific consensus up until the 1830's and 40's.
