There’s a lot of flat in the Tigris-Euphrates basin.
I just re-checked the Hebrew and I can’t find any “great exceedingly, exceedingly”. I found “more, more”, which could be rendered as “exceedingly”, but nothing that matches your phrase; I couldn’t even find a translation that says that!
Assuming you’re looking at verse 19, it goes like this: “And the waters prevailed more, more upon the land, and all the high hills that were under heaven were covered.”
Then stick with the rule that such accounts have to be read from the perspective of the people in them; take enough water to float the ark (a rise of at least a few meters) and add about eight meters more, and from the middle of Mesopotamia all they will be able to see would be water.
Try swimming that far down – I’ve done it as a lifeguard, and even though I grew up around rivers, lakes, and the ocean, I call that deep.
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Hi Richard,
Unfortunately in this type of forum tone and expressions can be misunderstood. I in no way was trying to lecture you or come across in a condescending tone.
I only wanted to reason from the Scriptures and focus on the text. Obviously we don’t agree on the interpretation of the verses we’ve been discussing and it’s not profitable to argue so I respectfully won’t continue this particular conversation and I wish you well.
Thanks,
Tom
There’s this:
Thank you. I will take a look at your work on this.
Much appreciated.
I was thinking more of the person who wrote Genesis and therefore would be the one who picked the wording. I am pretty sure Moses was aware of high mountains and deep seas and Noah didn’t know Hebrew.
That came from the translation note in the NET Bible. From a interlinear it is “prevailed more exceedingly”. The prevailed is gabar which means “to be strong, mighty” so it could be considered a repetition which is used for emphasis.
As I mentioned above, the point is what would the author (whoever you decide that to be) of Genesis be familiar with? Did Moses every travel to the Euphrates?
Hello Darrel,. I thought the following might interest you …
“The historicity of the Biblical Flood account is confirmed by the tradition existing in all places and at all times as to the occurrence of a similar catastrophe. F. von Schwarz (Sintfluth und Völkerwanderungen, pp. 8-18) enumerates sixty-three such Flood stories which are in his opinion independent of the Biblical account. R. Andree (Die Flutsagen ethnographisch betrachtet) discusses eighty-eight different Flood stories, and considers sixty-two of them as independent of the Chaldee and Hebrew tradition. Moreover, these stories extend through all the races of the earth excepting the African ; these are excepted, not because it is certain that they do not possess any Flood traditions, but because their traditions have not as yet been sufficiently investigated. Lenormant pronounces the Flood story as the most universal tradition in the history of primitive man, and Franz Delitzsch was of opinion that we might as well consider the history of Alexander the Great a myth, as to call the Flood tradition a fable. It would, indeed, be a greater miracle than that of the Deluge itself, if the various and different conditions surrounding the several nations of the earth had produced among them a tradition substantially identical. Opposite causes would have produced the same effect.”
We don’t know who wrote Genesis.
But we can be very sure it wasn’t Noah. The origin of writing in general and Hebrew in particular is placed well after the time of Noah.
The story is likely the transcribed and edited version of one (some experts argue 2) story(ies) from an earlier oral tradition.
The language of the Hebrew may give some ambiguous hints as to when it was written down, and I suspect the original source is even more unknown.
The flood of Gilgamesh adds another wrinkle.
Thanks for the reply. Do you see this as evidence of the “traditional” Noah story or just that a catastrophe flood or floods occurred
Thanks.
I found it online:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312087300_Reading_Genesis_in_the_journal_Perspectives_on_Science_and_Christian_Faith_vol_68_number_4_Dec_2016
Critical item:
As such, the correct understanding of its literal meaning must be canonical: that is, its literal meaning is to be determined by how it was to function as a religious authority within the community of believers to which it was revealed.
Why this is not obvious baffles me; one of the first things I figured out about the scriptures is that we are reading someone else’s mail and thus we have to read it the way they would have read it!
But . . .
Fundamentalists (and the naturalists who agree with them) take the literal meaning of Genesis to be what it would be were Genesis a modern science text arising from the background of western European culture rather than a text that may have sources over 3,000 years old, assumed a different cultural background from our own, and was written in languages and stylistic conventions that are completely foreign to us today.
That’s more accurate I suppose than my regular comparison that they read Genesis as though it was a friend’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he lived through and was reporting. That rather matches this:
… many fundamentalist writers seem to regard the proper meaning of a text as whatever they
thought it meant the first time they read it.
The whole thing is worth the read (including the notes!).
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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…”
I’d forgotten that bit – good call.
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.
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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.
It may only suggest that significant floods are common to many cultures as we see today.
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.
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Thanks for the comments.
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.