Versions that carry twenty to thirty people are common on lakes and rivers in South America, the Middle East, and southeast Asia. The largest one I saw a reference to holds a hundred-twenty. I really don’t see any reason they can’t scale up given the flexibility.
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That would be one scalp and probably not sea worthy. Nevertheless good discussion.
all of that and it ignores the actual point…the average mountain height increases as one gets closer to the Himalayas amigo. To the North of the “localised flood” is the Black sea (no mountains there). In any case this is only part of the problem…
If mankind evolved from Africa…then we have a huge discrepancy here between the bible model and the secular one and it falsifies any notion of a localised flood as that only creates more problems than it solves. For example, consider the claim that ancient Chinese or Indian cultures predate Middle Eastern ones…its untenable because both the Biblical and the evolutionary trail starts in the wrong place and direction for such a notion to be actually true!
Finally, i go back to the statements in the bible…which you have not a single time referenced…and did not actually read obviously… id suggest you carefully read what the record actually says…
4On the seventeenth day of the seventh month,
the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
5And the waters continued to recede until the tenth month,
and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.
This statement means that the ark must have landed at a similar elevation to the tops of the mountains. We must accept this because the text specifically tells us…
Noah couldn’t see the tops of the mountains for about 2 months AFTER the Ark touched down on the mountains of Ararat.
No, it doesn’t. “Mountains” can be anything from what we call mountains down to hilly country next to the foothills.
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If you read the text, it says that the ark came to rest on the hills/mountains of Ararat, which is northwest of Mesopotamia, away from the Himalayas, which are far to the east. (Ararat is roughly as far from the Himalayas as Perth from Canberra.) Mesopotamia is very flat and low-lying, but to the northwest, north, and northeast you reach uplands and eventually mountains before getting back down to the Black Sea.
Humanity originating in Africa versus Noah landing in the region of Ararat is not a conflict with the Bible. Humanity does not originate with Noah. Of course, how the physical process of creation of our bodies (which paleontology tells us about) relates to becoming spiritually fully human (which Genesis 1-3 tells us about) is highly speculative. The arbitrary way that different young-earth advocates claim that various fossils are or aren’t human reflects the reality that we don’t know just what physical features and preservable behaviors are the key indicators of being in God’s image. There are multiple models that take the biblical account seriously. Claiming that this is “the bible model and the secular one” is a serious misrepresentation. Indeed, the modern young-earth model is not very biblical in its selective modernistic exegesis and double-standards.
Do not forget to consider how Ararat could be there at all in a young-earth model. By the 1770’s, it was clear that large volcanoes required more than a few thousand years to build up, plus all the time involved in forming the rocks underneath them; indeed, the Roman Catholic authorities banned the claims of one young-earth advocate in the late 1700’s after investigating the question. Each lava flow or ash eruption has to have time to form and harden (and the ash has to be concentrated in a particular spot, which can’t happen during a modern young-earth global flood). That layer has time to weather, often all the way to forming soil, before the next eruption comes along. How many individual layers make up a large volcano like Ararat? In turn, the rocks underneath are made of numerous layers as well, each one taking some time to form and the vast majority clearly not deposited during a global flood. No flood geology model deals honestly with this evidence. A truly biblical model will seek to correct and improve itself, rather than resting on the inerrancy of the interpreter.
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My own personal take is it isn’t that surprising for a culture that emerges on the banks of two flood prone rivers to have a legend about an epic flood. The Tigris and Euphrates were the life blood of that culture, and those rivers originate in the mountains around Ararat. In fact, it is the weathered rock flour from those mountains that make the Fertile Crescent so fertile. On top of that, ancient cultures in the area thought their gods lived on Mt. Ararat, akin to the Greek gods living on Mt. Olympus.
I see no reason why it would take an extraordinarily large flood to spawn a story about an epic flood. Something like a 100 year flood (in modern Western parlance) would probably be fodder for legends and myth. I have noticed that even family stories 3 or 4 generations old can often take on a life of their own.
Now that I am thinking about it, I do wonder if lahars from a Mt. Ararat eruption could be the source of flood myths in legends.
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Very interesting thoughts. Thank you. I personally can accept almost any explanation because I do not believe the Genesis Flood story has any bearingon Christian Theology that Adam brought sin into the world and Jesus paid the price for all of us.
My big concern is that the church needs to find a route of explanation to people that dispel the mythology type of explanation but it was, as you say a real event, and could have been any size but significant to the Genesis writers, with the underlying message that God, who is good and totally the opposite of evil, demonstrates through the flood story that evil will not be tolerated. ,
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Lahars from Ararat would likely be noted in local traditions (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377535148_Lahar_Susceptibility_Analysis_of_Mount_Ararat_Eastern_Anatolia), but the lahars themselves would not affect Mesopotamia. Volcano Watch — Was volcanism in eastern Turkey related to Bronze Age floods? | U.S. Geological Survey speculates that an eruption in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters could have created an unstable dam, which failed and produced a major flood downstream, though with strong caveats about the idea being quite speculative.
Carol Hill’s A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture | Kregel has a fairly detailed development of the Mesopotamia monsoon model of flooding.
David Mongomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie (YouTube version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chHU5HPkxmM ) emphasizes that big floods do happen and are memorable. Noah’s flood is a real event, though identifying which flood event is challenging. Many extensive flood deposits are found in the Mesopotamian region, but we don’t have the necessary information to decide that a particular one was Noah’s.
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And I would add that God provides a means of salvation and new life.
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I guess there are two possible routes. The first is you could label them as parables instead of myths. I think most Christians have no problem with Jesus teaching through parables. For example, no one is torturing themselves over the question of whether the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan were real people. The second approach is to understand different views of mythology. In today’s world, “myth” often has a negative connotation, but I don’t think that was true in the past. Myths can be a very valuable tool for relating deeper truths and beliefs.
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None of them. Being “in” God’s image should be regarded as being “as” God’s image, which makes it a function: the world is a temple to/for God, and we are the image/idol/icon in the temple. It is a theological status that has nothing to do with any of our characteristics – indeed there are some severe risks if it is taken as being characteristics, e.g some early Christians held that reason was essential to the image, and thus that human life didn’t really begin until a child could talk (happily they were a small minority).
I don’t know about Ararat, but volcanoes such as Kilauea have many thousands of layers between the sea floor and the present caldera. Most of the layers don’t lie directly on prior layers but on surfaces that supported life, sea life to being with and then land life, the latter including substantial deposits of sand, which takes a long time to form, and rich soils, which require both degradation of volcanic cinder and ash plus decomposition and inclusion of plant matter.
Then there are volcanoes like Oregon’s Three Sisters complex which have similar cycles but grow more vertically due to the dominant lava type, while having their own indicators of immense age, such as lava types changing over time – a phenomenon resulting from changing composition of the contents of the magma chamber, something that requires hundreds of thousands of years since minerals in magma differentiate very slowly.
A truly biblical model will ask first what the text is rather than assuming it must be what it appears to be to a particular interpreter.
The consistency between stories that all the land was covered suggests something on the order of a once-in-a-hundred-thousand-years event – or possibly less, depending on the changing landforms and thus weather patterns. The consistent detail that there were no other (known) survivors lends support to this.
Heh – interesting, but successive monsoons following a heavy accumulation of snowfall would produce a larger flood event.
One could label them as quite a few things; the real question is what they are, and the Ark account bears a number of marks of myth(ologizing) around a real event.
True; the term, though, is more about a type of literature than about whether the content “really happened”. But myth falls into two types (though one of my professors disagreed that the first actually existed): “pure” myth, with no historical basis; and mythologized history, with at least a kernel of historical event at the core. Other than ardent YECers I haven’t encountered any Christian who has a problem with the Ark event being mythologized history – which is, when you get down to it, not too different from how we tell about past events, wording things to highlight what we regard as important, adding hyperbole, etc.