Hi. I read one of the articles/blogs on Genesis 7:11, but I didn’t get everything. Genesis 7:11 states that ALL the foundations of the great deep burst forth. Does this mean the flood was global?
It means the author used language that conveyed an effective image of staggering destruction. It was not a scientific report on geologic activity. It was a theological narrative intended to make people think hard about judgment and repentance.
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To state it in a different way.
Yes it means it was a global flood. The story is about a global flood that killed almost all life under the dome of a flat earth that the sun revolves around.
Just like the story Child’s Play is about a voodoo serial killer that after being betrayed by his body transferring killer gf got killed by a cop. He then slowly begins to turn this plastic doll into a toddler size thing of flesh with unnatural strength on a single minded mission of honoring Damballa by having a innocent murder someone so that Charles Lee Ray‘s soul can be fractured into dozens of other beings and become a beehive killer.
But the good news is that in both of those stories the literal definition of the words are not what determines the literary genre. Both are fiction and involves supernatural horror.
Which is very different from reading something like Mohr’s botanical journal where when he said he found a cinnamon fern he not only meant literally a cinnamon fern but the genre was nonfiction and fell within a botanist exploration story.
I feel like you are still confusing literal definitions for a nonfiction genre. The type of story being told , fiction or nonfiction, still uses actual words with actual definitions.
I’m sorry, but I don’t interpret the whole Genesis story as fiction. Metaphor may be in Genesis, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fiction.
Parables are fiction. Does that make them bad?
Agree with Christy. It communicates ideas in the language of the day. Sort of tough to say it is saying it is global, when they didn’t believe in a global earth. They believed in a land that was on pillars with water above and below.
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In that made up pre-scientific story, yes. But after two hundred years of science we worked out the true story in the rocks.
Kind of like as described here.
So what is the metaphors in genesis 1, 2 and 3? What’s metaphorical in them according to you?
I have found that they’re metaphors in Genesis, but what about symbolism?
Your previous statement to me was that you don’t believe genesis 1-11 is fiction, but there may be metaphors but that metaphors does not mean it’s fiction.
So i was asking what in genesis 1-2 is metaphorical in your opinion? What’s metaphorical and what’s nonfiction or literal in those chapters?
Genesis 2:24 is definitely one. However, it’s not really symbolic, like it doesn’t represent anything. If it may, however, feel free to let me know
There are many parallels between the structure of the temple and the Garden of Eden. So some scholars see the Garden as symbolic of God’s temple.
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Metaphors always have symbolism, are symbolic. It’s incredibly hard to get away from metaphor even in everyday language, ordinary words, every noun, every verb, adverb, adjective, preposition carries meaning. In context.
Which your verse ignores. The five previous verses and the two following. For a start.
Much can be made of the psychology of pair bonding and intimacy.
[With Eve a clone of Adam, both wanting to utterly know and utterly be known by another self.]
Kind of odd to call it made up when it is most likely a story passed down by an oral tradition going back before what writing there may have been was up to the task. That seems pretty different from what we mean by someone just made it up nowadays.
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It’s still made up. An allegorical folktale, very well polished by the C6th, after a thousand years of refining monotheism. A confluence of all that went before in the tales of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, Arabia, Turkey, Persia, India, Greece. But still completely made up in the two creation narratives. There are no historical events, only huge cultural changes they echo.
Made up as in deliberately misleading? Is its purpose to distract us from the truth or to point to an implicit truth which doesn’t require and cannot be fully appreciated explicitly? I think the arts -from which I think metaphor spring- appeal to an entirely non-rational but not irrational human capacity. I’m inspired to open a thread in defense of this alternate and perhaps more noble path to the truth based on a passage from the McGilchrist book which I hope will shake the very timbers of your epistemology. You know, I’m never tempted to take you up on your offer of metal to metal clanging because you obviously want to restrict the choice of weapons to rationality alone. But I see no reason to enter such a struggle with my best hand tied behind my back. I will @gauntlet you if/when I open that thread.
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Since your not seeing the story as fiction within the story itself have you looked at the science?
The highest peak currently is Everest at roughly 5.4 miles high. Many other spots are around the 5 mile mark as well. That would mean a flood would have to probably be at least 5 talk to cover essentially everything even if you think it was 1/2 mile shorter back then.
There could not have been that much water in the sky. Not even one mile worth of solid water around our atmosphere is safe. Not even a fraction of that. Everything would be super heated.
There could not have been a mile worth of ice, or chucks of ice because of issues like super freezing.
So that means the majority of the water would have to come from under the ground. It’s can’t come from the ocean because that water would still have to be in thenocean and would have to be replaced by ground water.
If it came from millions of geysers around the world everything would have been blown apart. Ever see how geysers are? Some hot springs can boil you to death. For that much water around the world to come out and cover the entire earth as quickly as it did would mean water coming from so deep it would have been boiling hot and no one would have drowned. They would have all be cooked to death and that’s just those that escaped being blown apart by pressure and speed. Not even the sea life could survive that.
So we know it’s scientifically impossible.
Now maybe you can argue away with a global flood for the lands argument and global down to isolated. If that’s the case then what peaks was covered? If still taken literally.
Only seem like two actual options are available.
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A much much smaller small scale event happened where a village in a valley perhaps was flooded and just a handful of people survived. Maybe just like in the story with Jesus telling the men to cast a net in the water an Angel woke up a family in the middle of the night or something and told them to get into a boat moment before their village was flooded. Impossible to know but whatever the story is over time a “big fish” event happened and the story was full of exaggeration and hyperbolic statements. Ofer time it was edited into something similar to what we have now.
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The story is not literal at all. It’s not based on even the smallest of floods. It’s a story meant to teach a lesson and to enrich the larger story. After all it a biblical pattern.
The dry land came up out of the water.
The garden of Eden was a island between lots of rivers.
The Ark and the flood.
Moses in a reed basket saved through the Nile.
The Hebrews pass safely through the Red Sea ( or whatever it was ) and the water crashed in afterwards killing the Egyptians.
All these stories center on being brought safely through the waters. In all the stories there is water and there is a savior. Often the savior is something wood related. The stick, the basket the ark the island full of fruit trees the dry land covered with fruits and so on. Those are symbolic for the messiah. The true tree of life. Think of the bitter water made drinkable and sweet by the stick thrown in it. It’s all connecting the dots for baptism. In baptism the imagery is we are swept up by the water. We die in the water. Christ saves us and we begin a new life. We are resurrected into new life. Romans 6:1-6.
All these stories are showing from the every beginning God has been saving us and it comes to fruition in Christ and the gospels.
No way was anything made up to be deliberately misleading, apart from obvious propaganda like The Book of Daniel. I can’t think of any other examples. I don’t see any evil guile in the more ancient literature of the Near East. There is sneaky radical prophetic humanism throughout the Old Testament. And I can’t see that the conservative priestly horror is even non-deliberately misleading.
But I’m bemused at the thought of there being a noble path to truth in The Flood.
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