Local Mesopotamian flood

Faith & Science Conversation
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There is no convenient rationalization, for either scenario: global or regional.

The only explanation is that both interpretations were forced on the original text!

@Jonathan_Burke’s paper on the regional nature of the flood does a good job explaining how the story was originally a regional.

But then someone else followed along and added enough changes to intend the Regional Flood to be interpreted as a global one.

A. Nobody spends a year building a boat to survive a regional flood; you build a sledge with some wood and move out of the valley!

B. Nobody has to float for a year, “trapped in a boat”, if the flood is regional.

C. Nobody sends a bird aloft to see if there is land nearby if the flood is only regional.

It’s a mess, plain and simple.

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The true meaning of the story of Noah’s Flood goes far beyond the historical events that might have inspired the original author. Modern science has determined that the entire earth could not have been flooded and then dried out again in just over a year, and that two of every known species of animal could not have fit on a ship 450 feet long, or that a wooden ship that big would even have been seaworthy. Those details take nothing away from the truth of the story: that all life on earth is necessary, even the creepy-crawly things we don’t like, and that God is capable of destroying all of God’s creation if we displease God. Arguing over whether the flood was local or worldwide is like asking Jesus for the names of the men who built their houses on sand and bedrock.

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Um, no, they did. They knew full well that Egypt, Canaan, Meluhha, Dilmun, Magan and the lands of the Uman Manda existed, but they are not shown on the map.

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@Reggie_O_Donoghue,

I have yet to read any convincing analysis that the Hebrew scribes -

knew of China, let alone Japan;
knew of North America, let alone South America;
or knew of Scandinavia, let alone Britain.

The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is notoriously incomplete and distorted.

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So how do you know the image you posted represents what was meant by the ‘whole earth’ by Mesopotamians?

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In my view the question about archaeological evidence of “a major local Mesopotamian flood” should be placed in a broader context.

We could ask:

Is there massive archeological evidence of Jesus Christ’s Resurrection?
Or is there such evidence of a historical Moses, Exodus of Israelites, and crossing of the Red Sea?

In my view the answer is NO to either of these two questions:

Regarding Jesus Christ’s Resurrection:

We believe in it on the basis of the testimony of many persons (Apostles, Maria Magdalena, disciples etc.), who reported to have seen Him resurrected, and whose accounts are trustworthy from the perspective of Salvation.

Nonetheless, one cannot yet definitely exclude that the Turin Shroud provides evidence for the Resurrection, and the search for biologic evidences on this twill linen cloth with more sophisticated methods is still going on (see for instance here).

Regarding Moses, Exodus, and the crossing of the Red Sea:

We believe in a historical Moses and the wonders God worked out through him on the basis of the authority of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who in different occasions referred to Moses and his wonders as narrated in the Old Testament. In particular, Moses’ authority is confirmed by Jesus in the episode of the Transfiguration upon the mountain.

For the time being it seems safe to claim that “no archaeological evidence has been found that confirms the crossing of the Red Sea ever took place.” However the debate on archaeological evidence for and against the historicity of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt is far from being closed (see for instance here).

Regarding Noah’s Flood:

As for Moses, we have to believe what we are taught by Jesus Christ and Peter’s Letters about Noah and the Flood. In postings in the thread “My theory about the Flood” I have argued that this teaching supports the following conclusions:

  • Noah is a historical figure and the Flood a historical event.

  • Nothing speaks against interpreting the Flood as local from today’s geographic perspective.

  • From the perspective of Salvation one has to accept that, excepted Noah and his family, all humans endowed with free will and capable of sinning living at that time perished in the catastrophe. This may have been a population of hundreds of thousands concentrated in a rather little area.

Nonetheless, to date there are no compelling reasons to pin a connection between any of the archeologically evidenced floods - at Ur, Kish, or Shuruppak - with neither the Flood of Mesopotamian literature nor Noah’s Flood. The reported archaeological data look somewhat paradoxical and raise questions: It is for instance unexplained how a massive Flood at Ur could have happened without letting any trace 11.81 miles away, in Eridu (see map). So probably we have to await renewed excavation and better scientific techniques to decide the question of whether the region around the first Sumerian cities was the scenario of Noah’s Flood.

In summary, interventions of God in human history (like the Resurrection, the crossing of the Red sea, Noah’s Flood and other similar ones) are unique events we believe on the basis of trustworthy testimonies (Revelation) and that could have happened without leaving “massive archaeological evidence”. Nonetheless the effort to find such evidence cannot be disqualified as nonsense.

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@AntoineSuarez,

I am certainly sympathetic to this view. I agree that the text was originally a story of a local/regional flood.

But I don’t see how you can view the final form of the flood story and not see the problems:

Here are three questions that immediately arise (“A”, “B” & “C”):

How much “special pleading” should we expect to have these three questions resolved?

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No, the text of Genesis 6-9 paints a pretty clear picture of the universal nature of the flood. It is the wrongheaded insistence that the story must be historical in some way – however tenuous that connection might be – that has been forced onto the text. The debate over inerrancy has muddied the waters.

Haha. Not book-length. Just a few chapters. :wink: I do happen to be working through these issues at the moment, but the heavy lifting has already been done by Middleton and Walton.

Before getting into that, a quick digression. Have you ever taken a close look at the substance of God’s curses in Gen. 1-11?

The serpent will crawl on its belly. (3:14)
Enmity between offspring of woman and snake. (3:15)
Woman will experience pain in childbirth. (3:16)
Man will dominate woman. (3:16)
Man must do painful work for his food. (3:17)
The ground will produce thorns and thistles (3:18)
Man will eat plants of the field (3:18)
Man will return to the ground in death (3:19)
Man is barred from the garden of God’s presence. (3:22-24)
Man cannot live forever. (3:22-24)
In the aftermath of the Flood, we also find these changes that don’t fall into the category of “curses”:
Fear of man among other creatures (9:2)
Everything will be food for man (9:3)
The rainbow is given as a sign (9:13)
Humanity was divided and scattered into nations (11:8)
Human language was divided and confused (11:9)

All of these things are the “natural” conditions of mankind. Pain in childbirth is the result of bipedalism and brain evolution. (Narrower pelvis + larger head = greater difficulty and pain in childbirth for humans vs. other primates.) Even the one possible exception – being barred from the Garden – explains the hiddenness of God. This is exactly what an etiological myth does; it explains how we got to “here” from “there.” The genre of Genesis 1-11, as much as evangelicals hate the term, is etiological myth.

At this point, the question becomes: How is this myth, Gen. 1-11, different from Mesopotamian myths? Skipping all the details and coming right to the point, the mythology of all the surrounding cultures is basically propaganda in support of existing social structures. The gods created mankind to serve their needs for food and shelter (sacrifices and temples). The king is the gods’ representative on earth and is responsible for all cultural advances, especially the building of cities and temples and the maintenance of aqueducts/agriculture.

Genesis, on the other hand, subverts the Mesopotamian mythology of empire and exploitation and turns it on its head. Genesis says that God did not create by violence, but by his spoken word. Genesis asserts that all people – male and female – are created in God’s image, and while the Fall may have perverted God’s purpose for us and infected human culture with sin, it is ordinary people, not kings, who found cities and advance the culture in Genesis 5. The genealogies of early Genesis are not filled with kings, a la the Sumerian King lists, but ordinary men and women. This egalitarian portrait of imago Dei in Genesis is what Middleton calls “the liberating image.”

In Middleton’s analysis of Gen. 1-11, he sees it functioning “to recontextualize Israel’s core theological and ethical traditions in terms of universal human history,” and “the categories for this recontextualization are taken precisely from these Mesopotamian traditions.”

Thus, what we see after “the fall” in Gen. 4-11 is a prophetic/symbolic representation of the progress of sin and culture. The story culminates with the tower of Babel, which is a critique of the concentration of power – economic, political, and religious – in the hands of kings and priests, who in turn use that power to exploit the mass of humanity in the service of the gods.

Now, lest anyone accuse Israel of judging other cultures from its own “objective” standard, the nation’s prophets critiqued their own culture by the same standards. This is Israel’s distinctiveness. In all other cultures, their religious literature serves as propaganda to justify “the system.” Only in Israel do you find the prophets criticizing kings, priests, and even the temple itself. And what is the focus of their complaints? You already know – idolatry and exploitation of the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger.

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Well… they do if God tells them to. Maybe that’s too simple… but from what I see in the text, Noah was a righteous man, therefore God told him to do something and he did it. It wouldn’t be the only time God has asked someone to do something that may have been “unnecessary” (Abraham & Isaac) but served as important foreshadowing for a later event.

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That’s my reading as well. As @gbrooks9 states, having the flood be local instead of global doesn’t solve most of the literal or scientific problems with the story. You can’t have Noah landing his boat in the mountains after months floating about without flooding most of the world. It makes a lot more sense as a morality and theological lesson that was written in a region that had numerous and unpredictable floods. Part of the reason that people settled in that region is the rich soil transported to the valley from floods, so it isn’t surprising that they would be used to teach about religion.

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Nowhere else is depicted, beyond the sea and islands is nothing but an empty void.

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I’m in no way implying that they were aware of the true extent of the earth, only that they knew that it contained more than a few cities in Iraq.

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@Laura

Did God also tell Noah to let birds fly … because he didn’t want Noah looking out the window?

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If you’d read any children’s picture Bibles you’d know that Noah released the dove while standing on the exposed “deck” of the ark, of course. :wink:

I’ve always just assumed the hills blocked the view… I mean, they probably would have died of ammonia poisoning if there were no windows.

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@Laura

So, I was being sarcastic. And you responded with a wink.
Then you topped me by saying the hills blocked the view of the bird!

Top notch answer!

I salute you!

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Birds were the ANE drones.

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Would you then also say that the narratives about Moses, Exodus of Israelites, and Crossing of the Red Sea are nothing other than “a morality and theological lesson” and do not refer to historical events?

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It is a possibility. However, I am not as familiar with the current state of research on the topic so I think I will stay out of those deep theological waters.

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@AntoineSuarez (@T_aquaticus),

if you don’t mind, I’d like to jump into your question; I look forward to what Mr. T_ will say.

There are lots of reason to think the chronology of events in the Old Testament is a corrupted record (either intentionally or not):

  1. We have one of the 10 tribes of Israel (Simeonites) living to the south of Judah (or even within Judah)… and yet they are supposed to be one of the Ten Tribes of Israel after the rebellion against the King in Jerusalem. This is the primary proof that the chronology of “the Ten Tribes of Israel” is at least fundamentally flawed.

  2. We have an Exodus event that, historically, makes no sense while Egypt is still running its armies and tax collectors throughout Canaan, in support of the imperial border territories in northern Syria. During this time,
    the strategic requirement for a safe “rear area” would have required wiping out the Exodus group.

It is only after the consolidation of the Pelest/Palestinians that Egypt was prevented from accessing Canaan (and points beyond) … and this is the context of Exodus.

If you can support Exodus (or something like it) after 1130 BCE, then maybe it’s historical… or parts are.

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George has advanced strong arguments against explanations of Noah’s Flood and Moses’ Crossing of the Red Sea in terms of ordinary natural phenomena.

On the other hand the teaching of Jesus Christ leads us to accept the Biblical narratives about Noah and Moses as referring to events which were really witnessed by the people living around these prophets. Additionally, in case of Exodus the very existence of the Jewish people along millennia strongly speaks in favor of historicity.

This seem to speak in favor of the option that both, Noah’s Flood and the Israelites’ Crossing of the Red Sea were miracles, which may have happened without letting behind archaeological evidence.
In this respect it may be helpful to consider the so called “Miracle of the Sun” or “Miracle of Fatima”, which happened hundred years ago, on October 13, 1917 (see for instance this article in the The Washington Post). Since May 13, 1917 the Virgin Mary was appearing to three children on the 13th of each month at Cova da Iria. On September 13 one of the three, Lucia Dos Santos, said the Virgin Mary told her, “In October I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.” On October 13, at about 2 pm the sun ‘danced’ before the astonished eyes of a crowd of 70’000 who had gathered at Cova da Iria to see the predicted miracle. The whirling sun was also seen by people who were not at Cova da Iria but in villages nearby. In the rest of the world nothing extraordinary was recorded.

Independently of whether one believes or not what many of those who were present witnessed thereafter, one can say that from a scientific point of view such a “dancing of the sun” (like “bilocation”) can be considered a quantum superposition of a macroscopic object, as illustrated by the well-known paradox of the “Schrödinger cat”. Additionally, the fact that 70’000 people perceived the phenomenon whereas billions around the earth didn’t, can be considered a demonstration of the possibility of “parallel worlds” very much in the spirit of the “Many-Worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. In summary, from a strict scientific point of view what happened in Cova da Iria on October 13, 2017 is a highly improbable natural phenomenon but not an impossible one. And the “miracle” consists precisely in that it was predicted by children above any suspicion. As far as I know, the only pieces documenting the miracle are the testimonies of eyewitnesses; there are no movies or pictures like the Turin Shroud or Guadalupe Tilma.

I think this miracle may provide a suitable explanation for events like Noah’s Flood and the Red Sea Crossing. These events were perceived by a number of people according to the Biblical narratives: In case of the Flood, Noah, his family and the sinners who perished in the catastrophe; in case of the Crossing of the Red Sea, Moses and the Israelites. In both cases archaeological vestiges are unknown for the time being and seem rather highly improbable, although cannot be excluded.

In conclusion: As argued in the thread “My Theory about the Flood” all humans endowed with free will and capable of sin at the moment of the catastrophe were affected by it. These may have been some hundreds of thousands living likely in the region of the first Sumerian cities said to have exercised “pre-dynastic kingship before the flood". Nothing speaks against assuming that all these people perceived things according to the Genesis narrative, in a similar way as the 70’000 gathered in Cova da Iria on October 13, 2017 perceived the Sun whirling in the sky.