May I ask how this helps the claim that Hell is cruel and therefore God is cruel?
(You appear to just be trying to claim some superior knowledge)
Richard
Where do you get that the land was âflatâ?
Backing up one verse you find
19 The waters completely inundated the earth so that even all the high mountains under the entire sky were covered.
tn Heb âand the waters were great exceedingly, exceedingly.â The repetition emphasizes the depth of the waters.
tn Heb âand.â
So a valid translation could be âThe very deep water covered the earth and all the high mountains under the entire sky were covered.â
From the Hebrew text. If the water rose 15 cubits and covered the hills, then the hills were no more than 15 cubits high. That would be a relatively land,
And there are lands like that.
There is a joke about Mid-America Canada that it is so flat that when your dog runs away from home you can see him for 3 days.
A flat land hundreds of miles across with hills no more than 15 cubits would require an exceedingly large amount of water to cover.
Just using the valid translations of land for earth and hill for mountain paints an entirely different picture.
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But the depth of the water was âgreat exceedingly, exceedinglyâ. I wouldnât call a depth of 15 cubits deep no matter how much water it would take to get to that depth. The text says nothing about the volume of water needed. The point is the depth of the water.
If you lived in a flat land with no exposure to oceans or Great Lakes, you would likely call it âgreat exceedingly, exceedingly.â
Judging the ancient stories by modern knowledge leads to misled views.
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Isnât that the truth!
Richard
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Darell,
If you can forgive my referring to my own work, I published an article called âReading Genesisâ in the ASA journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith for Dec. 2016. In it I reported a number of corrections of our usual (Augustinian) interpretation of the Adam & Eve and Noah stories based on a old Jewish understanding. I found these discoveries very satisfying after nearly a lifetime of struggle with Genesis 1 - 9.
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And yet thinking you can read these stories independent of modern knowledge is delusional. Human perception is a process of connecting up new data to the knowledge/beliefs we have already acquired.
This pretense of reading the stories as the ancients would have read them⌠is the construction of a fantasy with fantasy ancients to understand the stories as you want them to understand them.
This is not to say that doing this is any less valid than other ways of reading the text⌠only that it is no better. Though⌠the convolutive and deceptive aspects of this are suspicious to me.
Which is worthwhile, simply because we should not let those such as Augustine rewrite the stories for us.
~20,000-~30,000 I thought was the best guess. (~4 x number of adult males).
Thereâs also evidence for a population increase of ~30,000 in the Judean hill country between c. 1250 and c. 1200 BC. People that used a different style of pottery and ate way less pork than the old occupants.
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I, out of curiosity, looked at an elevation profile for the path of the Euphrates. It looks pretty flat for a while, then goes up much more steeply a bit above Baghdad. Looking at the scale, that âmuch more steeplyâ is a 0.1% grade. Other than that, the elevation changes at more like a 0.01% down to 0.001% grade. Here is that profile (ignore the spikes where it goes out of the river valley):
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Yes, just as bad as judging them by modern knowledge of the planet.
Yet that body is the body of the Ever-Begotten Word and thus is not bound by time (or by space, as a couple of Gospel stories show).
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Itâs more than that; in both cases we are âinâ the âvesselâ of our salvation. Paul uses that term âin Christâ frequently and gives it serious weight, enough that he isnât just using it metaphorically.
In the passages, no. In rabbinical practice, though, itâs a different matter, and given that Jesus acted and taught in the manner of a first century rabbi we can assess His words according to the norms of rabbis. Under that understanding, the most we can say is that Jesus regarded the Noah account as authoritative.
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I came across a reference to this recently and I canât recall where, darn it! Iâve read a bit more than a book a week this year and the contents kind of blur (must be a sign of age â in grad school I could ingest 12k pages in a week and remembered where everything in those came from, often down to the page number), but Iâve also been averaging an online lecture a week including ones by Michael Heiser and a couple about archaeology.
If it was a website, I didnât bookmark it, and I donât know how to search my browser history. Iâll have to go through my Nook library.
Along the way hunting for this this morning I came across an archaeologistâs explanation for how ziggurats came about: if a temple was damaged, it would often be knocked down in place, leaving a mound onto which mud would be heaped to make a smooth surface for a new temple; the same would be done if the king or high priest decided the temple was no longer big enough to suit the dignity of the city. After a couple of iterations the need to make the mound not appear as a pile of rubble would have led to surrounding it with brick, with the result that the temple wouldnât just be sitting on a mound but on a purpose-built platform. Do this several times (I think the maximum such layers found so far is fourteen) and the mound constraining the rubble would have become accepted as part of the structure, at which point if a new temple was needed the priest or king would also have wanted that platform to suit the dignity of the city, so increasing the height (and, necessarily, the surface area) of the platform would have become part of the project.
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I wouldnât call any of it âfictionâ; they didnât think that way. Embellishing and building symbolism into a story were regarded as legitimate ways to get a theological truth across; the core would be preserved but given a structure to make the lesson â considered to have come from God (or the gods) â clear to everyone who shared the writerâs worldview, which back then would have been all of the Fertile Crescent. A modern term for this is âmythologizingâ, taking an actual event and framing it in poetic, mythological aspects.
So what belongs to the actual event? Someone getting warned by God (âNoahâ may or may not have been the actual name; it is the same root as the Hebrew word for ârestâ [which implies safety and completeness] and so may be more of a title since this was the one chosen to provide ârestâ through a calamity; Iâll go with âNoahâ for convenience); the assembly of a craft for surviving; massive rainfall with storm winds combining to make an epochal flood that destroyed everything Noah had known and even known of; drifting with the floodwaters while being blown by the winds so the craft ended up around the lands of Urartu (âAraratâ is just the Hebrew form of that name)â being so isolated from other survivors (if any) that Noah and the other people on the survival craft believed they were all that was left of humans; the covenant afterwards.
The day the flood is said to have started just might be accurate in our terms; thereâs no obvious symbolism at any rate.
The larger numbers are probably symbolic, though I can believe rain that lasted forty days; growing up on the wet grey Oregon coast I experienced more than once a series of storms such that it rained every day for more than a month. Noahâs age is likely symbolic; six hundred was a very holy number for the culture (especially the Babylonians).
âAll the high hills/mountainsâ being covered may be hyperbole or it may be just the view from the ark; if they were in the middle if the Tigris-Euphrates flood region and standing effectively at âsea levelâ it wouldnât have been possible to see anything but water until after the storms had stopped plus they got blown by the wind over to where there were mountains they could see.
The fifteen cubits of water is an interesting one; English translations have traditionally gone with that being how high the water got above the âmountainsâ, but thatâs not necessarily what the Hebrew means. Fifteen cubits is about eight meters, and in the center of the region that might have been enough to cover what passed for hills, but not farther out towards the edge of the basin/valley. Fifteen doesnât have any clear symbolism; three times five could stand for several things depending on whether you go with the âsecularâ or the âdivineâ meanings â go with the divine and it could indicate Godâs (three) grace (five).
But if you take that meaning and multiply by ten, you get fifteen multiplied by a number standing for completion, so a hundred and fifty days is then quite symbolic, enough so that even if fifteen lacks clear symbolism up front, recognizing how it fits with one-fifty gives a basis for how to take it.
This is why itâs always essential to remind ourselves every time we pick up the Pentateuch to read (and even beyond it) that they didnât think like we do: our first reaction to X number of days is where that fits on a calendar, but their reaction would always have been the symbolism first.
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The rise of fifteen cubits is reported immediately following the statement that the flood had gotten deep enough for the ark to float; it is not necessarily tied to the hills (mountains).
Reading an account like this should never be done as though reading a newspaper, it should always be read from the point of view of whoever is in it. In this case, the fifteen cubits would be measured from Noahâs perspective, and so would the covering of the hills/mountains â and if the Ark was in the middle, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Noah wouldnât have been able to even see any mountains, all he would have seen would have been water.
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We disagree, and you disagree with the 5 Hebrew scholars who translated the NET Bible.
But I appreciate your comments and expertise
Thanks for your response. It sounds like you feel a warning by God is factual if I read your response correctly.
Wouldnât it be just as easy to assume that the flood event occurred and God was interjected as the reason as the story evolved?
Thanks.
Sea of Galilee has an average depth of 84 feet.
Dead Sea has an average depth of 618 feet, probably deeper back then.
Or do you think they were unaware of these bodies of water? Where exactly do you think they were living that is âflatâ? There are mountains. Mount Ramon in the Negev is 3,396 ft.
What makes you think Noah lived near the Sea of Galilee? Or the Dead Sea? Or the Negev?
I was at the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea last fall. It is not the flat land of Noahâs story. In that land, water rising 15 cubits covered the hills.