Because I wasn’t making stuff up, the Limited Flood theory has a long history & fits the text just as well. And anyway, I believe that while the Gilgamesh account MAY be the first written (and that’s debatable), the Genesis one is more accurate, and that they are both based on an actual incident.
Most of the complaints people seem to be presenting aren’t about it being fantasy, but about it being BAD fantasy. When you read a fantasy story you are asked to accept certain impossible things right from the beginning, like magic or monsters or 40 days of rain. Good fantasy will allow reason and logic to work within this new context and is self-consistent. Bad fantasy, like the flood tale, is not.
Oh, and as to the accuracy of the translation, where is zev_steinhardt? He should be able to answer that one for us right quick.
But flight, it certainly wasn’t “bad fantasy” to the people who wrote the story. They had no idea how big the earth was, how high the mountains were, how much water it would take to flood the “whole earth”, they had no idea where rain came from, they didn’t understand the water cycle, they didn’t know about Australia and the difficulties Australian animals would have in getting to the ark, as far as they knew everywhere in the world was pretty much the same as the local ecology, they probably didn’t distinguish between closely related species or genera of lizards and rodents and birds.
If you traveled back in time and did a linguistic study of the early Hebrews and collected a list of every named animal, the list certainly wouldn’t include 52,000 species, it would probably be only a few hundred. It wouldn’t seem incredible for every kind animal that the storyteller knew of to walk to Noah’s ark…since every kind of animal he knew lived near where the story supposedly took place. Feeding this many animals would be a challenge, but Noah had a really really big boat, and so on.
Of course the story breaks credibility to our modern sensibilities, since we know about the Americas and Australia and Madagascar and all the island isolate species, and how the water cycle works and how tall mountains really are, and how big the world really is, and that there is no such thing as God, and that the world is 4 billion years old, and so on. But given the assumptions of a nomadic Hebrew tribesman who lived 3000 years ago why exactly is the story “bad fantasy”?
Couldn’t have been all that bad a story as its still with us after thousands of years. 
-XT
One cannot use the same metric to measure the value of a burrito.
As is Zeus coughing up his offspring.
There is actually a midrash about why God doesn’t destroy all idols. The problem is that some heathens actually worship things that are useful, like the sun or the earth. Can’t go destroying those just to get rid of idol worship. And if God destroyed only the idols with no use other than worship, that would strengthen the faith of those who worship the useful things.
Except that the flood did supposedly destroy all except those on the ark.
Mark Twain once wrote that the most intelligent animal on Earth was the oyster. It had figured out ways of burrowing inside of rocks, onto the tops of mountains and into the middle Tennessee even though there were no other oysters around. (This was in response to the Fundals of his own time.)
My main curiosity as a child was “if there were only two kinds of most animals, or even if there were seven of some, what did the meat-eaters eat?” My teacher (I went to a conservative Christian school) rationally explained that God made them vegetarians for the 40 days. (Of course what they ate when they came off the boat’s another story.)
My understanding is that the oldest telling of the flood is not of Gilgamesh but of the Sumerian king Ziusudra (who unlike Noah’s paltry 9 centuries lived to be 64,800 years old.)
Hey, it sure wasn’t my bright interpretation. Sounds more like a hippo to me, if it weren’t for that “tail like a cedar” bit…
Sure, I understood you weren’t pushing the interpretation.
“He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.”
Stones? I’m told that ‘tail’ in this passage might actually be better translated ‘penis’ …
You are partially right. The story is swiss cheese now, but there were some major holes even at the time it was written. These include the previously asked questions of, “What did the carnivors eat on the boat?” and “What did any of them eat when they got off of it?”
Still for a tribe of nomads telling a fantasy tale it stands up better than a lot of the other ones I’ve heard. People still believing it is the odd thing.
I’m not a literalist, but think the Noah story could have been based on the apparent actual flooding that occurred when the Black Sea was formed 7000-odd years ago. To recap for those still unfamiliar with this, it’s thought that before that time, there was a smaller lake where the Black Sea is now, which was completely cut off from the Mediterranean, and was below sea level. Around that time, the natural rock “levee” separating the Med from the Black Sea region gave way and flooded the region quite suddenly. “Noah” might have been a group of actual people, or several generations of the the same family, who learned that the plain they were living on was well below sea level, and noticed that saltwater springs were cropping up in the hills to their southwest. They might have come to fear an imminent flood, but been dismissed and ridiculed by their neighbors, as happened with the Biblical character. At some point they could have built a boat, or boats, to save themselves and their farm animals. Regarding the animals, I would guess they took only the most essential ones for their agrarian life…maybe pairs of a few different breeds of goats, chickens, oxen, and so on.
National Geographic link (Just the geologic events, not my assumptions about the story which is just my yarnspinning).
Same thing I was kind of getting at about the Black Sea in my earlier post…I agree its plausable that this even left a lasting impression on the survivors and that its possible that this event served as the basis or core of the Noah story. We’ll never know though unfortunately…its all pure speculation.
I remember hearing that there was going to be some kind of underwater archeology expedition to the region to look for some evidence, but not sure if anything ever came of it or if they found anything. I doubt they did or I’m sure I would have heard about it.
-XT
I tend to analyze the early books of the Old Testament in this way:
I do not believe that the “physical” hand of God came out of the clouds gripping a pen to “write” the first five books of the Bible. I have always known that Moses was the actual writer of these books having been inspired by God.
In Moses’ time, the average citizen was not highly educated and probably wouldn’t have understood the scientific terminology or methodology that we understand today.
Example: the “creation” of Adam & Eve is described in the Bible as God forming a man from a mound of dirt/mud, but what if that was the only way Moses could explain that our bodies are made of a combination of single elements, all of which can be found in the dirt? What if Genesis seeks not to give a scientific laboratory-ish explanation of certain events, but rather an over-simplified narrative that describes in childlike terms how all that we know to exist came to be?
On to the flood, as I see it.
I don’t doubt that there was a flood. I don’t doubt that there was a man who, for whatever reason–from divine warning to rudimentary meteorological knowledge–prepared for what was to be a destructive weather phenomenon by building a boat.
He gathered all the animals he had ever seen (probably his own goats, camels, cattle, mice, whatever was indigenous to his region) to keep them from drowning. I don’t think he could possibly have had access to giraffes or lions or anacondas or tigers; I can’t imagine that they were ever common in Mesopotamia. Now it begins to rain.
Whether it rains for forty days or four days doesn’t matter. Imagine Moses relating this tale to his followers, who are very much like children in the IQ department:
“How many days did it rain, Moses?”
“Oh, I don’t know, a week?”
“Are you sure it was a week? My dad says that it would’ve had to rain for at least 40 days to flood that much.”
“Okay, so it rained 40 days! Can I just finish the story, please?”
What matters is that Noah’s region floods. This region is shared by many after Noah. For Moses, the easiest way to describe the flood was probably to say that the “whole wide world” was flooded instead of having to say, “Just the area between the Tigris and the Euphrates was affected, not the rest of the world which is really like a big huge ball floating in space, orbiting around the big hot bright thing in the sky.”
Of course, I am not a fundamentalist Christian. Ergo, I am able to give myself permission to think outside the box once in a while. The only fundamental I allow myself to embrace is the one that says “If there is a God, He’s the One who bestowed upon us brains that come complete with stunning potential from day one. Why would he create such a wondrous thing, give us free reign with it, then restrict the proper usage of it?”
Olives, clearly. I mean, if there was a branch, then there must have been a tree. Probably orchards and orchards of them.
If the entire earth and every thing in it was covered with water, that would mean there was 29,000 feet of water covering the entire earth for nearly a year,(Everest is 29,000 feet) how could any vegetation survive? No plants could pollenate,because the bees on the ark were not there to do so. Plus…all the water would have to evaporate, and even if the ark had windows, the amount of water evaperating at that pace to get rid of 29,000 feet of water the air would be as full of water as an ocean itself. Imagine if you can all the insects, alligators,crocadiles etc. Then all would have to swim back to their own countrys. It is pretty evident that the entire world being flooded is not possible, and no olive tree would survive the pressure of the water. Nor any other.At that depth there would be no light either. If the ark landed on Ararat, which is 15,000 feet figure out the time it took to get to that level,because if the boat was on ararat it would mean 15,000 feet was still there for it to be able to settle at that height.
Monavis
Creationists typically get around these objections by saying that it was catastrophic changes in the Earth’s crust during the flood that made everest so high, thus reducing the total amount of water required, also that mature vegetation survived on ‘floating mats’ - that entire islands of loamy soil, complete with mature trees would have floated around, then settled back down and planted themselves when the waters subsided.
No, of course it doesn’t bear any resemblance to reality; it isn’t meant to - creationist arguments are just misdirection - they aren’t intended to inform, just to try to divert the recipient away from the evidence as swiftly as possible.
How Did Noah Get The Animals In Unknown Countries:
Well God knew about them so he could just tell Noah where they were (Duh!).