Noah's flood and the leaf

[naita]

@Max_Torque

If humans were vegetarians until the flood, why did Abel raise and kill animals? For fun?

o/~ They say there was a secret sauce,
that Abel used and it pleased the Lord.
But you don’t really care for mutton, do yah?

[caligulathegod]

@XT

Well, everything on earth WOULD have died, had the biblical account actually happened, but since it’s just a myth it doesn’t need to be scientific to be a good story.

Also, I don’t believe in the Bible that it’s ever stated that everything died (obviously not the stuff on the Ark, for instance). You have to understand that the folks who wrote the Bible account (well…the folks who wrote the original story and the folks who wrote the Bible account borrowed it from, I suppose :p) had a rather tenuous understanding of what the world was, how many animals and plants lived in the world, what the actual ramifications of a world wide flood would be, and how plants and animals would or could survive in such an event, etc etc. Today we can see how impossible all of this would be, but they didn’t have a clue, except observations about local floods they had seen or were told to them. To them, it was perfectly fine that there could be enough rain to flood the world as rapidly as happened in their account, that some birds and plants would survive (and all the fish and such would be perfectly fine during all of this, since Noah didn’t have any on the Ark), and that said bird could find said branch and bring it back as a sign that thar be land again!

Might be giving them too much benefit of doubt. Here’s the quote:

Genesis 7:21 Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. 23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

[Buck_Godot]

@BrainGlutton

One explanation I’ve read is that in those days plants were not thought of as living things the way animals are living things, they were thought of as something that just naturally grows out of the earth in the right conditions.

Of course, I should think that in any culture that has or knows of agriculture, everyone knows that plants don’t grow without seeds. But, seeds do not appear to be living things.

Yeah, basically this. The purpose myths is not historical and scientific accuracy. Its to tell a story that feels true to the listeners. All the listeners needed to know is that oceans don’t have trees, and dry land does have trees. Therefore if the seas recede to the point that there is dry land, then there will be trees. This is the same reason you don’t need to worry about where all the people Caine met came from, or how the cow Audhumla got stuck in the ice in the first place.

Also as far as determining which exact flood it was that responsible for the myth, this seems to me to be also overthinking the issue. Even without being as spectacular as the creation of the black sea, a standard 100 year flood that puts your entire village under 5 feet of water is impressive and if you survive one you tell your children about it, who tell their children, who then use it as the dooms day scenario in the allegory they are making… Given the strong similarities between the Gilgemesh myth and the bibilcal myth, and given the close proximity of their cultures it seems very likely that they come from the same root. But the ubiquitous nature of the flood myth across cultures suggests to me that nearly every culture at one point or another has encountered a really big floods and were impressed by their devestatiing power, and so floods made their way into the cultures oral history. Note, for example, that we as a culture are perfectly capable of making the movie San Andreas even though we have never experienced an magnitude 9.6 earthquake that dropped a city into the sea.

[TonySinclair]

@Colibri

Here’s the passage in question:

6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark…

The premise of verse 11 is that the bird must have plucked the leaf from a living tree.

Since the biblical account is a myth, it doesn’t need to make scientific sense.

It doesn’t make any kind of sense. Why didn’t Noah just look out the window?

[Claverhouse]

The Kraken would have got him.

[Folacin]

@Colibri

Since the biblical account is a myth, it doesn’t need to make scientific sense. My guess is that the idea was that the tree had survived being submerged and sent out leaves again when it was exposed by the receding waters. The fact that olive trees couldn’t survive a lengthy immersion in salt water is irrelevant (except for biblical literalists).

But how salty would the water be? If you posit a rain storm (fresh water, presumably) large enough to cover all the mountains of the earth, I don’t think the salt content would be that high.

Of course, most plants won’t survive 40 days of submersion in fresh water either, but I’d think they’d be more likely to survive that.

[Siam_Sam]

I’m not sure Mel, the OP, is coming back. Might be upset we dissed the bible myth.