If you don’t at least make an effort to read them as the original audience would have understood them you may as well admit that you don’t think they have any meaning at all and are just using them as an excuse to spin your own imagination. Words have meanings, and the meanings that count are the ones intended by the original writer and audience.
There is no division within the Savior, so wherever His divinity is there also is His humanity. That He has a human body does not limit His human nature to being in heaven.
And if/since He is not bound by time, what body other than the Incarnate one would He have had? an ad hoc temporary “costume”?
Two narratives that show His body is not bound by space are the sudden appearance among the disciples when Thomas is present, and the disappearance from the presence of the two disciples after the walk on the Emmaus road.
I’m getting a bit perturbed with my memory: I searched my Nook and didn’t find anything, searched my internet history as well – but then searching internet history depends on knowing the website I read something on. The only thing remotely close that I came across was an apologetics article on some fundamentalist/literalist website that offered Eridu, as the commonly recognized earliest city in the ancient near east as the place the Tower of Babel would have been, but they had no citations to lead me anywhere else.
Addressing those in reverse order, the latter would be what I expect to be extradimentionality, a ‘spiritual body’ that is not necessarily visible in our three physical dimensions nor limited by our materials. That does not imply omnipresence with no spacial limitations, it just implies a different physicality of his incarnation, not unlike that angels may or may not be visible to us.
If you can grant that, then he is no more omnipresent than when he was first on earth, nor no less timebound than when he first humbled himself and took on flesh and its limitations. That flesh I would not characterize as an ad hoc costume. It therefore does not accede “And if/since He is not bound by time…”
So someone just happened to have built a structure that would float and got his animals and family aboard?
There’s a problem if there’s no warning because the major precipitation driving such a massive flood would have been in the northern highlands, and even if the storm front came from the southeast the lead time between the rain starting and getting a household with livestock aboard a craft isn’t sufficient to build a suitable craft, plus once the storm hit on its way northward building anything would have been difficult to impossible.
Literalists invoke heaps of miracles to explain their misunderstanding of the text claiming this was global, but all that’s really needed is one miracle: God giving a warning in time to build a survival craft; all the rest is just a mega-storm (or two, if you go with a proposal I read a while back that the first part of the flood event was massive snowfall up in the mountains, the second would be a massive warm storm that melted the snowpack in a matter of a couple of days).
Why would someone in the middle of the “two rivers” region know about those? Remember, these accounts should be read from the perspective of the people in them.
What’s relevant is how long the story was passed down orally, especially since we now know that oral story-keeping was capable of passing things down for generations with little to no change.
Most likely one that was mythologized by a heavy-handed redactor.
Not really; at least from Old Testament studies I’d venture that the most we can say is that the core of the story is quite old, and the redactor who mythologized it pretty well ruined any clues as to just how old. Just one detail is illustrative: we probably don’t even have the name of the head of the group that survived; “Noah” is a slightly altered form of the Hebrew word for “rest” and is likely more of a title than a name, since “rest” in this context would indicate the one who kept them safe from the flood.
Yeah. When I last actually studied this stuff the prevailing view was that the Gilgamesh account, the hero being Utnapishtim, and the Ziuthustra and Noah and other versions are not any of them derivative from another but go back to an older source. I recall in a bull session someone venturing, “Who says these were all the same guy?”, i.e. maybe we have multiple survivors of the same flood – not a serious question in scholarly terms since the accounts are a bit too close for that, but pointing to another issue, that of the multiple deluge accounts from around the world. That, though, is more of a popular issue than a scholarly one since for the most part what they have in common is, “ warns X, X builds a watercraft, huge flood comes, X survives”, which isn’t at all enough to suggest a single event and the other details differ enough it’s essentially impossible for them to be from one event.
I’m not sure how to interpret the biblical account of the flood, but the prevalence of so many flood stories in so many cultures suggests that we’re not dealing with a myth, but a catastrophic event that affected all mankind.
Also, people tended to live near rivers and in valleys, where water was available and rivers provided a means of commerce and transport. Places that flood.
As I have mentioned before in other threads, 8-foot tall Procoptodon kangaroos and 23-foot Varanus priscus monitor lizards haven’t been alive in Australia for over 30,000 years, and yet they are still remembered by its inhabitants.
Well, given that Varanus is an extant genus and Procoptodon is close to living kangaroos, they probably weren’t around until after the hyperevolution after the super brief ice age after the plasma ball-earth cooled back down and recoalesced after fundamental constants arrived at their modern values.
I appreciate all the replies. I want to get some thoughts on other parts of the story.
1 God regretted making man.
2 God gave a rainbow as a sign of a new covenant.
Sorry I did not do the exact scriptures.
These just sound plain goofy to me and fictitious. I know we often focus on regional flood versus global but even separate from the math and science I cannot get past some of the basics of the story.
I just drowned everything so here is a rainbow and I promise not to do it again. Seriously?
If you’ve seen anything here about God’s omnitemporality, you may recall that any tensed verbs we use (the only kind we have) have to have qualifiers attached. So ‘regretted’ is past tense and does not strictly apply. Maybe what should be more potent is the regret we cause him who is the eternal Now. And I routinely fail to be as sensitive to that as I should be.
Others may differ as to what the image of God in us means, but personhood I think is an attribute that is implicit – that includes feelings. So God can feel pain (and we’re told that in Ephesians 4:30).
Others can speak to the literary types and their associations with the cultures of the time where I certainly cannot, and to the historicity of the text, and it is certainly more than unlikely it was the first rainbow ever. But God may just have given Noah such a providential gift as assurance of his continued faithfulness to mankind.
I remember when I was at a low point several decades ago (about four ; - ), the timing and placing of a rainbow where I happened to be able to see a small arc of it against blue sky was astonishing. It is difficult to describe, but it was early morning through a small window partly covered on the inside and partly blocked on the outside by a wall perpendicular to the one the small window was in. There was also a large and fairly bushy pine obscuring even more of the sky. So the view of the sky was particularly limited. My confirmation bias1 let me be comforted and encouraged by it, inferring it to be a providential gift from my faithful and sovereign Father.
An example from geology is that the natives in the U.S. west coast region had accounts of Mount Mazama blowing its top and leaving Crater Lake, and those accounts match very nicely with what geology tells us about the event. That’s only 7700 years ago (hey – they missed the Flood!).
Thinking this is goofy tells me that you have boxed God into a very narrow picture of Him as incapable of things which any human being can do. Because it doesn’t look goofy to me at all. If I created people who became totally evil then I would very much regret making them. That this seems goofy to you, means… either you aren’t remotely what I would call human, or the God you have imagined is so far from what I would call good that if such a thing (god) existed then it would have only my contempt.
That is goofy only if you take to mean God created rainbows apart from everything else just for such a purpose. But we make monuments of natural things all the time and have them represent other things. For an example, each state in the United States has a state bird (and a state flower). Of course the birds (flowers) themselves were not created for the state. That is indeed a rather silly to suggest.
You have given me two things to consider. Either I am not human or I am boxing God into preconceived ideas.
I think I am human. I am not an alien as far as I know.
I am sure I have preconceived notions about God but who doesn’t?
However, I am not sure I made my point clear. I am suggesting the two references I made are not really about God but were simply added by the writer(s) of the story.
BTW. Is it appropriate on this forum to suggest a person is not human if they don’t meet your expectations?
Is it appropriate for me to suggest that people who like torturing little children are lacking in humanity?
…but then if you create a group of people who decides they like torturing little children, then would you remain proud of the group you created? And if someone remains proud of creating such a group then doesn’t this say something about their own lack of humanity?
I very much believe in tolerance. But there are logical limits to tolerance. Our liberties must end at the same liberties of other people. And toleration logically does not include a toleration of intolerance.
And yes… I very much think our humanity consists of more than just a biological species.
(I want to see Ken Ham ride one. ; - )