Or maybe there was a group of about 30 divided into 5 or 6 squabbling settlements beside a tiny lake about 5 miles wide, and when disaster struck, like a volcano plus the waters rising one chap threw his family and livestock onto a raft and paddled about in the darkness until it subsided, and after hitting shore found the other 24 people dead = extinction of all humanity.
I think I shall offer this to Ken Ham as a solution.
I never took it as the olive tree had survived, but rather as soon as the flood waters subsided from various places seeds magically sprouted, and grew real, real fast. Which is absurd, but no more absurd than the rest of it. And we certainly don’t get the impression that the earth was a barren wasteland for years and years while the soil got desalted and trees grew.
After the flood would make an interesting disaster movie but a short one, as either Noah and folks ate all the animals and died of starvation or the animals ate them.
As Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory asked: What would they have fed the lions?
Well, if the fish are still around, having an ocean to swim around in: Tuna?
(Plugging plot holes in ancient myths, since 1973. Yes, siree, this story Ark - heh - ain’t sinking yet…)
Oh my. You remember the question but you don’t remember his mom’s reply? It was classic!
“The corpses of drowned sinners.”
“There must have been a big …”? No, there mustn’t. It’s just as likely people living with regular and sometimes catastrophic flooding could come up with a world spanning flood without believing they had experienced one. In fact there is evidence supporting that hypothesis in the existence of parallel or older myths in the region where the flood is “merely” a very large river flood
According to many, prior to the flood- everything (and everyone) was vegetarian. It wasn’t until after the flood that we started eatiing meat.
Could even be a very, very distant folk-memory of the end of the last Ice Age, the melting of the glaciers, the rise in the sea level, the inundation of the land-bridges, e.g., the one between Britain and France. Probably not, more likely a memory of one or several of the many periodic local floods in Mesopotamia, but it’s interesting to speculate.
I see. I shall give that notion all the consideration it deserves.
Rather tough on the anteaters and mosquitoes.
And blue whales. Or did it only apply to land animals?
Never mind that, what about the penguins? And the polar bears? It’s a long trek from the polar regions, you know.
I love the smell of bloated bodies in the morning!
I think you’d have to go some way down the food chain in the ocean to find something that could plausibly have enough to eat on a vegetarian diet.
Anyway, even for the land animals, how much vegetarian food could you stash on the Ark, for the duration? If there’s one thing they didn’t have a lot of, it would have been plants, surely.
I guess if we go with pescetarian, we could be on to something. Even better for ovo-lacto pescetarian. And I guess everyone probably lost some weight. Yup. Back in the day, lions were very hip, and very slim.
hey - I never said the position made sense - but its based on the bible verses -
pre-flood
[QUOTE=Genesis 1:29]
Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
[/QUOTE]
post flood -
[QUOTE=Genesis 9]
Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything
[/QUOTE]
.
Yeah, but all that means is that humans were vegetarians until after the flood. Apparently he gave the animals other animals to eat well before this.
Usually, it’s said that it happened right after Adam and Eve sinned, so animals could no longer eat from the tree of life–which people claim was what kept everyone immortal.
There’s nothing in the scripture about when he gave the animals meat to eat - its ‘clear’ in 1:9 that he includes the animals as vegitarians at that point. The similarities in word structure @ 9 ‘just as I gave you before, I give you now’ would certainly imply thats when he also loosened the rules for the animals.
So - there is no ‘apparently’ here unless you have a biblical cite for it - since we’re talking about what is in the bible.
(and I don;t really mean to belabor the point - scripturally, we were vegetarians until the flood - the animals were vegetarians “until some point” - biblically, all we have is those two sections that speak to it)
If humans were vegetarians until the flood, why did Abel raise and kill animals? For fun?
sheep - for wool- beyond that - we can only guess.