Sea level rose several hundred feet as the glaciers melted. People were alive at the time and quite probably had spoken language but writing had not developed yet. There could easily be verbal accounts of places that no longer existed because they were now under water. Since they were verbal and passed down over thousands of years the stories undoubtedly changed.
Much of the old testament seems to blame the victim. It’s only logical. If something bad happens to you, and God controls everything, he must be upset at you for some reason. The implied next question would be “What did you do?”. In the story of Noah, God decides to flood the world because he is upset about something.
At the end of the last glacial period, for a thousand years or so, the area that is now the Sahara desert was a place where people would actually like to live. There was enough rain to support rivers and lakes. Could distorted verbal transmission turn this into the Garden of Eden? Once Adam and Eve get God pissed, he drives them out and blocks the entrance with a pillar of fire. That sounds like a great way to make the whole place really hot and dry. Once again, we blame the victim and punish all of mankind.
The Torah is not a historical document and the people and events it describes almost certainly did not exist for the most part. It was composed in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile based on legends a few centuries older (with significant Babylonian influences) as part of an effort to create a national identity for the Jewish people and a theological underpinning for the supremacy of the Second Temple religion.
Trying to find rational explanations for the miracles described therein is a fool’s errand because they are not based on things that actually happened.
My understanding is that from 20,000 years ago to 6,000 years ago sea levels rose almost 400 feet as glaciers retreated. This caused flooding all over the world which is why so many religions have flood myths.
It was my understanding that the persian gulf was kind of an oasis before the flooding, and that the people there eventually had to retreat into Iraq as sea levels rose. Supposedly that is where the abrahamic story of the great flood started.
The location of Eden is described in the Book of Genesis as the source of four tributaries. Various suggestions have been made for its location:[3] at the head of the Persian Gulf, in southern Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run into the sea;[4] and in Armenia.[5][6][7] Others theorize that Eden was the entire Fertile Crescent[8] or a region substantial in size in Mesopotamia, where its native inhabitants still exist in cities such as Telassar.[9][10]
Also, supposedly at least, the story of Adam and eve and the tree of knowledge was a metaphor for humans transitioning from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to an agrarian lifestyle due to climate change.
That’s still half a millennium before the written word and that rise (and fall) in sea level was literally and figuratively glacial. Noah’s flood happened (and ended) over a short period of time just like most localized flooding which is not infrequent even in modern times.
The same. It reminds me of the old “Seed Of Truth” fallacy. Supposedly all stories, (especially the ones being pushed) have a “Seed Of Truth” behind them that can somehow bring a bit of truthiness to those stories. Thus, no story is actually false because if you dig down far enough and squint hard enough you will find that “Seed Of Truth”.
Stories of the Flood were certainly based on a real flood or floods. But it’s much simpler to assume that the inspiration was a more local flood, of which there were plenty in that area.
This. Great floods (local great floods) are relatively common. They come on suddenly, too, because the local river rises quickly as rain water from the flood basin connects into it. And an ordinary flood is consistent with “it rained a whole lot, and then the flood came”.
Glacial melt would have come after a hot time, not a wet time. It might have been sudden, if the ocean had to get over a ridge but then poured into the valley on the other side. On fact, that kind of flood was probably so sudden there weren’t survivors to tell the tale .
Which among other issues is implicitly asserting that fiction is a modern invention and nobody before the present ever…just made things up.
An issue with a lot of these attempts to tie ancient stories still known in the present to events & stories lost to history is that they essentially assume the people of the past were relentless, unimaginative literalists who just passed along stories for no other reason than passing them along. Instead of making up stories or modifying them for various purposes ranging from teaching to just making them sound better.
If a myth has a worldwide flood, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than some people in ancient times said to themselves “You know what would be scarier than a big flood? One that covered the whole world!!” There’s no more reason to assume it had to be based on some prehistoric flood than to assume dragons were based on dinosaurs.
The contemporary indigenous groups of Cascadia had no known written documentation like that of the Japanese tsunami, but numerous oral traditions describing a great earthquake and inundation exist among indigenous coastal peoples from British Columbia to Northern California.[6][10] These do not specify a date, and not all earthquake stories in the region can be ascribed to the 1700 quake; however, virtually all of the native peoples in the region have at least one traditional story of an event of unmatched destructive power.
Some of the stories contain temporal clues—such as a time estimate in generations since the event[9]—which suggest a date range in the late 1600s or early 1700s,[6] or which concur with the event’s timing in other ways. For instance, the Huu-ay-aht legend of a large earthquake and ocean wave devastating their settlements at Pachena Bay places the event on a winter evening shortly after the village’s residents had gone to sleep (consistent with the 9:00 PM reconstructed time).[11]
Somewhat more recent. Oral traditions of indigenous people can at least suggest that something happened.
For that matter, several tribes in the Northwest have oral traditions about the Missoula flood, which happened nearly 15,000 years ago, so there’s certainly a remote possibility that the flood legend that the Jews picked up in Babylon during the exile was a distant memory of a glacial flood.
Be that as it may, though, the story as written in the Bible isn’t an attempt at documenting historical fact - it’s an allegory that was written the way it is for theological purposes. The author/s are intending to teach that Yahweh is a non-dual entity which is both harsh and merciful - he is the source of both salvation and destruction, and he punishes the wicked and saves the righteous. Noah’s piety is demonstrated by the fact that he observes kashrut in separating the clean and unclean animals, and the first thing he does after the flood is erect a vineyard because wine is an essential for sacrificial offerings. The ark lands on a mountaintop because as late as the end of the First Temple era Yahweh was seen as a mountain god and altars to him would be constructed at the highest point near a settlement (e.g. the Temple Mount being the highest point in ancient Jerusalem before it expanded to encompass Mt. Zion.) The whole narrative is rich in numerological significance I only know very little about. The human race is culled to a single family because, at a time where tribal identities had been lost, it was important to establish that nobody’s ancestors were more important than anyone else’s. The story ends with God making a covenant with Noah and establishing the Noahide code, which are the seven laws all of mankind (not just Jews) are expected to adhere to. It’s really a morality play mixed in with a couple of just-so stories.
I wonder if fact becomes allegory after the fact sometimes. When I was a child I was taught that Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Moses etc. were all real events, but as time brought forth more facts that didn’t seem to match up with Biblical narrative these slowly turned from “Of course it is fact” to “This is actually allegory…and it has always been allegory-You must have remembered it wrong.”
Tribes in australia had oral stories about the coastlines being totally different before their great floods. It was eventually determined that the oral traditions were giving accurate information. So they held onto information through oral tradition for ten thousand years.
To most of us, the rush of the oceans that followed the last ice age seems like a prehistoric epoch. But the historic occasion was dutifully recorded—coast to coast—by the original inhabitants of the land Down Under.
Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.
That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.
“It’s quite gobsmacking to think that a story could be told for 10,000 years,” Nicholas Reid, a linguist at Australia’s University of New England specializing in Aboriginal Australian languages, said. “It’s almost unimaginable that people would transmit stories about things like islands that are currently underwater accurately across 400 generations.”
The oral traditions in the biblical accounts seem to have been significantly embellished. They wanted to come up with reasons why God would do such things. Keep him happy and he does nice things for you. Get him upset and you lose your wars.
Oh, it’s definitely undergone a lot of changes. The ancient Jews most likely learned the flood story from the Babylonian religion during the exile, as a version of the Utnapishtim narrative from the epic of Gilgamesh, then adapted for their own purposes and inserted it into the already-existing Genesis narrative. This would account for a few of the inconsistencies that are caused by having an extinction-level event in the middle of the story, like Tubal-Cain being named as the inventor of blacksmithing when the art would have died with him in the flood, or how there could be Nephilim in Canaan when the Israelites arrived when they should have all perished.
