Making sense of Flood stories from around the world

So last week me and my brother who is also EC had a talk about the Flood from the Bible and though he agrees that there is no geological evidence for it, he brought up to me the amounts of flood myths from around the world that sound similar to the Flood story of Genesis. So my question is, how do we make sense of these stories? This just isn’t ANE comparisons, but look at the link I will give and see how stories from Asia and North America also seem to give a hint of the Genesis Flood story in some way. How are we to make sense of this? My brother claims this is proof of a world wide Flood despite the lack of geological evidence. My other case I gave is that if not a world wide Flood, then it was a far more ancient Flood that effected early humanity in the early Neolithic period when humanity was still gathered in one single location and the effects of the Flood stuck in the minds of humanity sense then.

I’ve been curious about this in the past as well. From what I have been able to find concerning the stories of North American native tribes is that between the time of first contact with Europeans and the time when Europeans began to record Native American stories and myths, several centuries lapsed. During that time, missionaries were actively trying to convert Native Americans. So I have been wondering how many of the stories on the North American continent are the result of the tribes mixing Christian stories in with their own myths…

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Race memory of the deglaciation outburst floods 24-8 kya.

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Hey, Quinn. Another good place to start (if you haven’t already done it) is to read the Biologos essay on that very topic.

Among some of the approaches often discussed around here, are the variously supported conjectures about actual (non-global) flood events that would have contributed to common narratives of these sorts. So it need not be all-or-nothing regarding historicity of floods, though the science is pretty clear there was never a world-wide flood that left no land anywhere.

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Almost every human cultural group will experience flooding at some point in their history. In the past few years there have been many examples of floods in some of the most arid deserts of the Middle East:

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What’s up with the Nu’u myth from Hawaii? It clearly has ‘something’ to do with Noah. Is it, as I suspect either the result of missionary influence on the Hawaiians, or missionary distortion of an original Hawaiian myth?

I suspect a little from column A and a little from column B.

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