Of course, never proven wrong is a matter of opinion. I have never seen any credible evidence a global flood occurred in recorded or geologic history.
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Which version of the story are you talking about? It is obvious that two stories were combined into one.
And I have a rock in my front flower bed that proves the flood never happened.
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Regarding cubits and the size of the boat, I found Jim Stumpâs article âLong Life Spans in Genesis: Literal or Symbolic?â (October 5, 2017) to be insightful. The fact that the genealogical ages in chapter 5 can all be expressed as combinations of base-60 and 7 alludes that Hebrew may not have been the original language in which that section of Genesis was recorded. The author may have simply acted as a scribe who translated the flood account to Hebrew from Sumerian or Sumerian or Akkadian. The numbers would thus have been in cuneiform. Iâm not even a novice, but from what I read it seems like the numbers would not have directly included the unit of measurement.
Hattiâs were a Stone Age/Early Bronze Age people group in what is now Turkey on the south side of the Black Sea. Though they had no written language, there are Hittite texts that describe them. According to https://www.worldhistory.org/hatti/, â They spoke a language called Hattic and did not seem to have a written language of their own, using cuneiform script for trade dealings. As the region was heavily forested, the Hatti built their homes of wood and made their living through trade of timber, ceramics, and other resources.â
There is an age-old body of guidelines borne from experience, called âscantlingsâ which determine the appropriate relationships between boat length, height, width, and the thickness (moulding) of the hull. The key is in the relationships between the numbers. But the Genesis flood account only specifies three of the numbers - length, width, and height. The thickness of the hull is not specified. Or is it? God inspired Noah to build the ark out of gopher wood. Older translations rendered gopher as squared timber, or beams. Could it be that the beam thickness was the reference, and the other numbers were in relation to it? In other words, the length was 300 beam thicknesses, the width was 50 beam thicknesses, and the height was 30 beam thicknesses. So why was cubits specified? Is it possible that the translator added cubits not to mean an actual Sumerian cubit, but whatever they thought most closely represented the original measure? This certainly is not a unique occurrence in Bible translation.
I used to day-sail in the Milwaukee bay. I also enjoyed woodworking and decided to combine the two hobbies by building my own wooden sailboat. So I did a lot of research on boat design, construction techniques, etc. The largest known operable wooden boat ever made, âWyomingâ was well short of the 300 cubits specified in the flood account, and it was barely seaworthy and needed over 300 tons of iron rods to hold it together. So where did Bronze Age Noah get all those metal rods? It is doubtful that the ark was actually 300 cubits long.
Given the level of technology back then, it is likely that the length would have been limited by the longest beams available.
You have a rock in your garden that proves that a global flood never happened. Agreed.
How about the Black Sea flood of the Holocene period? Or Lake Agassiz ice dam collapse?
The issue is the interpretation of âwhole worldâ. Why is it that some theologians and preachers are so adamant that âwhole worldâ in the flood account means the entire globe, while at the same time they accept Luke 2:1âs âwhole worldâ as really meaning Caesarâs Roman Empire? Shouldnât we thus interpretation the flood âwhole worldâ as really meaning Noahâs world?
What I really donât get is why the insistence that the flood âwhole worldâ means global. What Christian theological position, what doctrine would be ravaged by considering it to be The part of the world that Noah knew?
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Tom you replied to me instead of the thread.
But I did find this:
My person take is the flooding of the Persian Gulf.
Good thoughts. It could have been the Persian Gulf. But Ararat is next to the Black Sea. Hydrology, the stratification of salinity, and the presence of human settlements on the former shoreline indicate a flood âof biblical proportionsâ 
Either way not a global flood.
The Septuagint translates gopher wood to squared timber, the Jewish Encyclopedia to cedar beams, and the Peshitta to boxed wood.
Besides their availability as-is, the advantage of using square beams for planking is that you will alway have at least one rift/quartersawn side to enable bending without splitting - an important consideration in wooden boatbuilding.
That would be a mischaracterization. Geologists (and scientists in every other physical science) look at the evidence, ask âWhy is it this way?â and conclude deep time. Did you have to be trained in gravity to believe in it?
New evidence always supports the antiquity of the earth. A favorite (by a Christian⌠and it includes a favorite word):
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Ararat is nearly 200 miles from the Black Sea. You have the Pontic range and the combo of two river valleys, YeĹilÄąrmak and Ăoruh, before you even touch the foothills.
This all got me belatedly thinking as to why I believed in The Flood for at least 30 years from my mid-teens, had a side bet on Eden for 40. That the full deconstruction of magical thinking lasted until well in to my 60s. I still want - desire - God, the loving ground of eternal being, in Christ to be true, thatâs all thatâs left after 50 years of magical thinking. So what explains the power of false belief? Identity. This is another excellent take on it from 7 years ago. Iâve known and felt that itâs about identity stories for years now. The concept of identity is 25-30 years old for me. Even my remaining desire is a vestige of identity insecurity. Iâm 67 and not in the best of health. Iâm going to cease to exist one way and another over the next 10 years, easily. Iâm going to die. Rationality says thatâs the end. From nowhere to nowhere. From oblivion to oblivion. I felt that nauseatingly at age 14. Existential angst. Fear of death. A year later I was hijacked.
My takeaway from the excellent article, which shows that forty five years after my adolescent crisis, that we, as the most advanced culture in history, were still stumbling in the dark to the glimmer of light. The takeaways:
Factual correction is ineffective, how can you make people change their misperceptions?
When thereâs no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. Itâs when that change contradicts something weâve long held as important that problems occur.
If information doesnât square with someoneâs prior beliefs, [t]he[y] discard[s] the beliefs if theyâre weak and discard[s] the information if the beliefs are strong. [amended for gender bias!]
Even when we think weâve properly corrected a false belief, the original exposure often continues to influence our memory and thoughts.
Strongly held beliefs continued to influence judgment, despite correction attemptsâeven with a supposedly conscious awareness of what was happening.
False beliefs, it turns out, have little to do with oneâs stated political affiliations and far more to do with self-identity: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person do I want to be? All ideologies are similarly affected.
Persistently false beliefs stem from issues closely tied to our conception of self
etc, etc
Just make people feel good about themselves for good reasons in their stories. Something Iâm woefully bad at here in playing capture the flag. Which Iâve known about for⌠years now. No excuse any more! Apart from the tenacity of the 4th & 5th effect above.
So, can we all walk naked together here and not point and laugh? Now that Iâve done the Penn & Teller exposĂŠ? Where do we hide!?
We have hundreds of thousands at our house, mind you, most of those are under a centimeter shells from discrete layers with dozens of index fossils.
Does anyone here agree with the idea that the ark was actually a reed mat sort of vessel with central structure and that the passage has been grossly mistranslated and misinterpreted to be a wooden boat? A discussion of it is found in this ASA article, near the end. Also an interesting article so far as the relevant geology:
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Yes, could have been a reed mat or boat.
All of this of course is conjecture because we really donât yet have all the facts.
But letâs rate how realistic the Bible flood account is of a major flood that predated not only the Hebrew culture, but also Babylonian, Assyrian, Sumerian cultures:
- not at all
- unlikely
- possibly
- likely
- unlikely
If there was a major flood that was the common source upon which all the flood stories are derived, what evidence is there that the Bible flood account is a derivative of the Babylonian account, and not an independent account of the common source? If it was independent, then among all the known flood stories, which appears to be most likely the bare, unbiased news? And which appear to be ancient versions of Harry Potter?
Nope. Although great for fertile crescent flooding. Wouldnât take 120 years. Coupla days for an extended family.
Itâs impossible for it to be independent as the cultures werenât.
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The Black Sea was originally a fresh water lake. Yes there was a rapid, in geological time, conversion to a marine environment, but I donât think it would have appeared to the locals as a âfloodâ.
But could Noah have built the ark with no iron tools or iron works?
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Yes, my impression is that it was more of a âLooks like weâll need to move again this month.â sort of thing.
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To be fair if it is geocentric in its outlook surely that is because us humans on this earth are the focus, along with Godâs message to us. In day to day language we STILL refer to the sun rising etc even though we know itâs because the earth is spinning.
Re the Black Sea I understood there is evidence that if the Mediterranean Sea did indeed break into the Black Sea a few thousand years ago it would have been seen as catastrophic flooding over a relative short period of time.
Define âshortâ. According to this paper
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322716302961?via%3Dihub#s0190)
10 years is a long time to humans and 40 years is a couple of generations. Certainly in the range of âLooks like weâll need to move again this month (or year).â
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