Very good and very tough questions. I presume by Enoch you mean him being translated. My view of Enoch starts with God’s expectation that we live by faith, something I know I don’t do very well, indeed, I do it rather badly. I think Enoch one of two guys who lived such a life of faith that they were translated. But they were not sinless, and my personal view is that Enoch and Elijah are the two witnesses in Revelation (I know, there I go again believing the bible. lol). Even Elijah and Enoch were not sinless and as Steven King says in the Green Mile, a death is owed.
I want to say, that because of the age of these events, they could not have been handed down by oral tradition. The information in the scripture would have to be evidence of divine inspiration–real communication from God to the writer. This is no different than God telling Abram he was going to have a son as an old man with a very old wife. Somehow God communicated something REAL to Abram, so I don’t see a problem with God communicating real info elsewhere.
I am going to address the flood first. I don’t know if you have read my views on the flood or not so If I am repeating for you, forgive me. I have addressed that here on biologos and have a slightly updated version on my blog
6 my ago, the strait at Gibraltar rose and cut off the Mediterreanan from the Atlantic, causing the waters of the Med to evaporate. Just last month I ran into geologic data which made a match betwween the biblical description of Eden–Tigris, Euphrates, Nile and Pison were all flowing into the desciccated Mediterranean basin. I was both excited, shocked and rubber-legged, knowing the reaction this kind of stuff gets. People tend to think Im nuts. lol But the only time in geologic history that these 4 rivers were together was from 6 myr until 5.3 myr I will post the map of sediments from these rivers, all of which were mapped by other geoscientists in the search for oil. It is important to note these sediments are from the time just before the catastrophic infilling of the Med basin took place.
There are so many things from the Bible that fall into place if we place Eden where I suggest.
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Deep basins get very little rain, especially the end of it which is on the upwind side as was the Eastern Med at that time.for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth" I would translate ‘earth’ as land’ for that is the most common meaning of ‘erets’. So we need to look for a land where it didn’t rain. That rules out Mesopotamia.
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No rain, no rainbow. The special mention of the rainbow after the flood indicates to me that it is a novel phenomenon.
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The Bible gives us a hint about when Eden was. " and there was not a man to work the ground*." This was before the Neolithic-- And the beginnings of agriculture go back as long ago as 15,000 years.
The word translated as till mostly means ‘work’, so that is what I chose to do with that verse.
Abad: “to labour, work, do work. 1A2 to work for another, serve another by labour. 1A3 to serve as subjects. 1A4 to serve (God). 1A5 to serve (with Levitical service). 1B (Niphal). 1B1 to be worked, be tilled (of land). 1B2 to make oneself a servant. 1C (Pual) to be worked. 1D (Hiphil). 1D1 to compel to labour or work, cause to labour, cause to serve. 1D2 to cause to serve as subjects. 1E (Hophal) to be led or enticed to serve.” Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship.
“The first clear evidence of a successful and long term settled community comes from people caned the Natufians, who lived in the Near East from about 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. They occupied lands on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the region that is now Israel, Jordan and Syria. The early Natufians gathered the wild emmer wheat and barley that grew there. They made stone sickles to cut the cereal grasses, and the sickles bear signs of the characteristic polish caused by the silica in cereal stalks.” Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 126
The sickle is a characteristic tool of Agriculture. 12000 year old Adams is long after “there were men to work the ground”
Of the people running up to Noah,I outline the technology issues in Gen. 4 in post 76, 81, and 85 in the thread Did Noah’s flood Kill All the Humans except his family? But I don’t get the feeling your question is about technology. My guess is that you are wondering about lifespans and what kind of people they were. Of lifespans, my view is if god wants someone to live a thousand years, they will live a thousand years.
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the hydrology described in Eden can only happen in a deep basin.–rivers splitting into many, and artesian flow causing mists out of the ground. 5.3 myr ago is the only time such a deep basin existed on earth, The hydrolic head on artesian flow would be large.
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When the dam at Gibraltar collapsed, Atlantic waters roared into the basin at 223 mph. This is the fountains of the deep, or a good immitation thereof. Here is a numerical model of the catastrophic flood. 100 m/s is the red–that is over 200 mph
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This flood lasted 8 months to a year. The model above says it took 200 days for the eastern basin to be filled. If the eastern basin was what Noah was aware of then we are somewhat close (models can be tweaked) to the Noah entered the ark 2nd month, 17th day. the ark grounded on the 7 month 17th day. That is 5 months or 150 days. A bit bigger opening to the atlantic in the model above would solve that misfit.
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because the basin was about 12,000 feet deep, this flood also covered high mountains. “And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the land; and all the high hills” Mesopotamian flood have no high hills to cover! The land is very flat. This is the only flood in geologic history of which I am aware that matches the Biblical description of Noah’s flood.
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This happened at the time hominids (our group) first appear on earth.
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This time 5.3 or so myr ago is the only time genetically we can have a primal pair. Our oldest genes are this old!
In my experience good theories have things fall into place. Bad theories require snipping and cutting. What fell into place this last month was the realization that geology is consistent with the 4 rivers of Genesis.
Tower of Babel. The story doesn’t say how high the tower was. The materials they were making it of would not support a very high tower. “Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter”
In Genesis 10, the word used for the ‘father-son’ relationship is yalad, and it merely means ‘ancestor of’. Because of this, the Bible doesn’t give us much of a clue how long after the flood this happened. But I believe it happened. I do believe it happened, I have some controversial linguistic support for Babel on my blog. One of the interesting things is that if each of these language groups remained small and isolated, their language wouldn’t change over time rapidly.
“Another problem that has vexed glottochronology is that languages may evolve at different rates. Both modern Icelandic and Norwegian are known to have evolved from Old Norse, which was spoken between AD 800 and 1050. Norwegian and Old Norse have 81% of their Swadesh list words as cognates, correctly implying a separation of 1,000 years ago. But modern Icelandic, which has been much more isolated, shares 99% of its words with Old Norse, wrongly implying the two languages separated only 200 years ago. Rate variation can be taken account of in the maximum likelihood approach, essentially by choosing trees with the minimum amount of variation necessary to fit known dates of language divergence.” Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 214
The reason this is important is that such slow language change in small groups might have made the Babel signature last much longer than normally thought. Thus the controversial stuff on my Babel page.
If it happened in the land of Babylon (shinar) it would have had to happen shortly after Noah’s descendants started moving south out of the mountains of Ararat.