@Burrawang has asked for answers to two questions about how other Christians read the flood account in Genesis if they don’t think it refers to a global flood. This thread is a place where those questions can be discussed without sidetracking other topics.
I’ll restate my earlier response from here. Those who take the flood as a local or regional event typically say Noah and his family built the ark because God told him to, not because it was the easiest thing for them to do. Of course God could have saved them other ways, whether by directing them to move to a safe place elsewhere or by ensuring the flood turned the ground beneath them into floating vegetation mats. If God could preserve all kinds of invertebrates on these immense and innumerable floating islands, God could do the same for all kinds of vertebrates.
Do you really believe that God would have had Noah and his sons build the enormous Ark by applying an almost unimaginable amount of hard manual work if God was perfectly capable of protecting all the right people and animals on floating islands?
A few answers from different perspectives:
(1) Most here who take the flood account as historical but not global see it as affecting a large region, unlike regular local floods.
(2) Obviously “destroy all flesh” is hyperbole, since all flesh was not destroyed. God brought the flood to judge how wicked people had become (Gen. 6:5–8). We aren’t told yet of people spreading out much. They only do so when God confuses their languages, which of course happens well after the flood. So, all humanity (or all humanity that Genesis is focusing on) could be destroyed by a flood without it being planet-wide. Even if there have been larger floods since, none of them were sent by God to wipe out humanity. God doesn’t promise there will never be another flood of the same scale, but that no flood will have the same purpose.
(3) My view is that the story is a parable that teaches us why God puts up with our sinfulness. When read as historical, the story makes God look too human. God is sorry he made humans, and God learns that even wiping out everyone and starting fresh with one family doesn’t cure humanity. Both the reason for the flood and the reason God won’t send another are the same: the evil inclination of the human heart (Gen. 6:5; 8:21).
When God pierces the heavens and the foundations of the earth so the primeval waters stream through from all sides to cleanse the earth, it doesn’t solve the problem. The earth is still dirty. So God sets down his bow on a raincloud and promises that as long as we see that bow, we know that God will never do this again. God sees that it doesn’t work. The human heart is still wicked. Noah’s own falling-naked-from-fruit scene comes right after the flood.
I take it as a parable that shows us why God wouldn’t do things that way. I don’t believe God actually needed to try it to find out. God doesn’t really use a bow, so God didn’t really set it down and that’s not where rainbows came from. The imagery of the promise is metaphorical, and that’s how I take the whole story.
thank you for your well considered response, it is greatly appreciated!
Clearly we have very different worldviews and very different understanding of the Holy Scriptures.
When I read the account of the flood and the instructions God gave to Noah to build the Ark, (which by my feeble calculations, would have taken the best part of about 100 years to build), as they would have had to fell the trees manually, cut lumber from the logs manually, dress the lumber manually, etc., before they could even begin to build the Ark, it would have been an enormously difficult task.
Even today with all the technology, power tools, trucks, cranes etc. and availability of timber delivered from a phone call to a lumber merchant, constructing such an enormous ship would still take years, but having to do everything from scratch would have been a monumental task, fortunately people lived a lot longer then than these days,or it would not have been possible for Noah to complete it.
The Bible is absolutely clear about the Ark being required and that Noah was obedient and built it, because the flood was a real event, it rained for forty days and forty nights, that is not a parable it is real history faithfully recorded for our instruction, and the evidence is all over the Earth right now for anyone to see, if only they would open their eyes and see.
I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone can believe the flood was actually just a parable or only local, no matter how broad the flood was, even if it was 100 or 200 miles across, it would still have been simple for Noah and his family to walk or ride out of the flood zone, thus building the Ark at enormous effort over many, many decades makes no sense whatsoever for a local flood.
What does make sense is the Bible is trustworthy and true and can be trusted to mean precisely what is so clearly written that the flood was indeed over ALL the Earth, i.e., it was Global.
The many stories that have been concocted to accommodate evolution and deep time such as the words in the Bible that say “all the Earth” really only means, a small part of the Earth was flooded where humans were is typical of the compromised view of the Holy Scriptures that disregards the Truth to accommodate belief in the reigning paradigm of evolution and it’s companion ‘deep time’.
As you have stated that you believe the flood account was a parable, I take it, that you believe there was no flood and there was no ark?
From what you have stated, it appears you believe the whole account of the flood can be looked upon as a literary means of conveying God’s displeasure with sin, without ever occurring.
If that is so, then, why wouldn’t God just speak the Truth, and plainly say so, rather than making a false story about a flood that never happened?
The flood account is clearly not a parable, because when a parable is given words such as, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like….” are used, that make it clear that it is a parable, but in the historical flood account, it is written as a real event that actually happened, just as the crucifixion of Jesus really happened and the resurrection of Jesus really happened, so the flood really happened, and it covered all the Earth,as the Bible faithfully tells us.
The flood is a myth. There are three main reasons for this.
It was obviously part of the epic of Gilgamesh, or perhaps a later book that was incorporated into the epic of Gilgamesh at a later date. Then the Hebrews borrowed it and reimagined it in a way to better fit with the story they wanted.
It’s a small part within the first few chapters of genesis which is well known among experts of the Torah/Old Testament that is hyperbolic and mythological. Hence, immortal men, people made of mud, giants, talking flying snakes, flaming swords that float, sea dragons and so on. Other clues such as if you look at the ages of those the people, some of them would have still be alive into the flood base off the genealogies.
Scientifically, a global flood is impossible. We know this for a few reasons. One is the the fossil record is organized by speciation, which is the radiation of species as the basal form develops more and more divergent traits. It’s not organized by size or mass in the geological layers, and it’s not utter chaos. So that disproves a flood. The other thing is that for even the tallest mountains to be covered, water would have to come from so deep, with so much pressure, it would steam/boil everyone and everything even if you were in a ark.
There is nothing obvious about what you are claiming.
Therefore, it follows that you do not believe Jesus.
Jesus taught the Flood was real history, as real as His future second coming in fact, thus I expect to be consistent, you don’t believe that either. Please consider Jesus words here:
‘Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the Ark. Then the Flood came and destroyed them all.’Luke 17:26-27
I guess that you cannot see in this Holy Scripture that, Jesus straightforwardly talks about Noah as a REAL person who was His ancestor and the enormous Ark as a REAL vessel, and the Flood as a REAL event. There is not even the slightest hint from Jesus that the Flood was anything but a REAL Historical EVENT of history. And He would know because He was there!
With regard to the Gilgamesh epic or more accurately it was Utnapishtim’s flood, it makes far more sense that Genesis was the original and the pagan myths of ANE tribes at that time arose as distortions of that original account. While Moses lived long after the event, he probably acted as the editor of far older sources.
The whole Gilgamesh-derivation theory is based on the discredited Documentary Hypothesis.This assumes that the Pentateuch was compiled by priests during the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BC. But the internal evidence shows no sign of this, and every sign of being written for people who had just come out of Egypt. The Eurocentric inventors of the Documentary Hypothesis, such as Julius Wellhausen, thought that writing hadn’t been invented by Moses’ time. But many archaeological discoveries of ancient writing show that this is ludicrous.
You may claim that the Gilgamesh epic was embellished from a severe river flood, i.e. a local flood and was the source of the Biblical account. This might work if there were similar flood legends only around the ancient near east. But there are thousands of such flood legends all around the world including from here in Australia with the Australian Aborigines having an ancient story about a massive flood and in South America every ancient every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a great flood.
Thus, no I don’t accept your point 1 for a nanosecond.
Well that is plain hogwash of the first order!
What "experts of the Torah/Old Testament think that it is hyperbolic and mythological"?
Well if your reasoning here is consistent, then I have to ask, do you believe the miracles of Jesus were real events or do you think they are also hyperbolic and mythological?
Is feeding five thousand people from a few loaves and fishes a myth too?
Is commanding the raging storm, wind and high waves to be still and they obeyed a myth too?
Utter nonsense. If you flattened down the mountains and lifted up the ocean basins the depth of water all over the entire Earth would be about three kilometres, and that isn’t even including all the groundwater that goes down deep into the crust.
No the fossil record is interpreted by those with an evolutionary worldview to show slow and gradual speciation. So where are the trillions of clearly intermediate fossils? And I don’t mean slight variations within a specie or kind, I mean where are the examples of legs appearing or other big morphological changes that if they came about by untold numbers of small increments, then where are they? Nowhere, simply because the whole concept of evolution is the myth here!
When Mount St.Helens exploded and pyroclastic flows laid down of metres of fine layers that are now rock many slow and gradual beliefs were dispelled by eyewitness evidence:
You may learn a lot more about this by reading the honest and informative article at:
A relevant excerpt from that article is below:
One of the many surprising results was an 8 m (25 ft) thick sedimentary deposit exposed in a cliff alongside the North Fork Toutle River (figure 4). It is composed of finely-layered sediment (figure 5). From eyewitness reports, photographs, and monitoring equipment, it is known that this whole deposit formed in just three hours, from 9 pm to midnight on 12 June 1980.1 It was deposited from black clouds of fine, hot ash mixed with gas, blasting at high speed from the volcano—a pyroclastic flow. Ash-laden and heavier than air, the flow surged down the side of the volcano and along the river valley at more than 160 km/hr (100 mph), hugging the ground and depositing ash.
The big surprise was that the sediment deposited in fine layers called laminae. You would expect a catastrophic, high speed ash flow to churn the fine particles and form a uniform, well-mixed deposit. Thus, it had been conventionally thought that fine layers had to accumulate very slowly one upon the other over hundreds of years. But Mount St Helens showed that the coarse and fine material automatically separated into thin, distinct bands, demonstrating that such deposits can form very quickly from fast flowing fluids (liquids and gases). Since then, laboratory experiments have shown that fine laminae also form quickly from flowing water. This shows how finely-layered sandstone deposits in other situations, such as some of the lower layers in the Grand Canyon, likely formed rapidly, which could have happened within the time-scale of Noah’s Flood.
The Mount St Helens eruption also demonstrated how canyons can be formed much faster and in a different manner than conventionally thought. Ongoing eruptions eroded the thick sediment dumped at the base of the volcano, producing multiple channels and canyons. One such channel was dubbed ‘Little Grand Canyon’ (figure 6), being about 1/40th the size of Grand Canyon.1 Its side walls were up to 40 m (140 ft) high, its width up to 45 m (150 ft), and a small stream of water ran through it. Someone coming across that canyon could easily conclude that it was eroded slowly and gradually by the small creek now running through it, over many hundreds or thousands of years.
However, the formation of this canyon was documented. It was carved by a mudflow caused after a small eruption of Mount St Helens melted snow within the crater on 19 March 1982. The mud built up behind debris, burst through it, and cut the canyon in a single day. So, the creek did not cause the canyon. The canyon caused the creek.
I do not agree with that claim…we have only 1% of the expected fossil record and the facts show that the vast majority are in fact marine animals…up on dry land all around the world.
This is completely at odds with your claimnthere.
Also, we have examples of different kinds of animals in the same layers and areas…not many but they are there.
Add to the above the folds in the rock layers in the grand canyon without evidence of cracking in the rock (which has been tested and proven under electron microscope in the lab…what you claim is not as comprehensive as you claim.
What we find are an ever increasing number of supporting evidences. There will always be dissagreement, however, the “data” in support of the literal biblical model is growing in volume.
I would like to add, none of this is absolutely necessary for all salvation. Christ gave us a workaround…
Love God and Love your neighbour. Be a good Samaritan
I stopped reading your stupid comment after “ you don’t believe in Jesus”.
I do believe in Jesus. I just graduated high school. I continued picking up books by biblical scholars and by scientists. So I mostly avoided ever getting sucked into dumb like YECism.
So I can tell that by you rejecting what’s obvious, you’ve not read much work by scientists , or meta analysis of journals, or by biblical scholars. So you don’t believe in the Bible or in science. I can say that stuff too.
Ad for all the questions I did not read, but skimmed a few. You can most likely find discussions already on them by doing keyword searches.
Thats a rather dogmatic answer…indicative of someone who doesnt read jack crap.
It also shows that you do not actually look at any evidence unless it comes from a source who already aligns with your own world view. If ever there was an example of indoctrination…that is it. Its difficult to have a well considered discussion with someone like that.
Those of us who are truly well read do so from a variety of sources and we form an ecclectic view of our world view. I am niether conservative or liberal…im very much in between.
I’m sorry you feel that way, but I think you may have the bull by the horns here,
Nowhere have I ever said that I don’t believe in Jesus. That is plainly false.
I’m glad to hear that you do believe in Jesus, but that then does raise the question why you do not believe Jesus when He said:
‘Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the Ark. Then the Flood came and destroyed them all.’Luke 17:26-27
As I said before, Jesus straightforwardly talks about Noah as a REAL person who was His ancestor and the enormous Ark as a REAL vessel, and the Flood as a REAL event. There is not even the slightest hint from Jesus that the Flood was anything but a REAL Historical EVENT of history. And He would know because He was there!
Therefore the Flood that covered the Earth was real, it was absolute, there was no escape from its effects anywhere on Earth except inside the Ark.
Dear Scov,
actually I believe both, but if the Bible clearly states something and current science says the opposite, I will put my faith in the Bible every time and have done so for a very long time and I have seen the Bible vindicated time and time again when new discoveries turn what was previously believed on its head,such is the nature of science.
Even given 100 years, that isn’t enough time. As you say
In addition to the advantages you listed, Noah would be limited by the lack of durable metal tools (he predates the iron age) and having to grow the food for his family. I don’t think even 100 years would be enough time.
Interestingly, second Temple Jews would have pointed to 6:1-4 as explaining verse 5, and thus a deeper reason for the Flood: to wipe out the Nephilim because they were the ones who had corrupted mankind.
But part of it did work: the Nephilim, instructors in unrightousness, are gone (and in “the rest of the story”, found in Enoch, the Watchers who spawned the Nephilim are, as Peter notes, locked up in chains of darkness in Tartarus, held till judgment day).
It should be pointed out that the Hebrew doesn’t say that the rainbow is anything new; what it does say is that it now has new significance.
Strange that the Holy Spirit would have a writer use a form of literature that didn’t exist yet instead of one that would actually carry meaning for the original audience.
Nowhere in the Flood story does the Hebrew say “all the Earth”; that is a later invention that came about due to shifts from one language to another. The Hebrew says “all the aretz”, that is, the known world.
I know by now it’s pointless to try to instruct you, but for the sake of those who might be misled by your words, it should be noted that the “deep time” view of Genesis came along over a millennium before Darwin, which makes your claim ridiculous. For that matter, the idea of a Big Bang came along over a millennium before LeMaitre, and it was drawn from scripture.
You don’t understand how literature works, do you?
Have you ever taken a literature class focused on things written at least five hundred years ago? Have you ever taken a class on ancient history and culture? Have you ever studied another language long enough to dream in it?
If you haven’t done those things, then you are clueless about what counts as speaking the truth. Here’s an example of one way that truth can be communicated:
I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.
There are many others, a fair number of which aren’t recognizable to modern Westerners because they are unfamiliar or alien or unknown or all three.
The Flood account reads as mythologized history, which is one of those ways that isn’t recognizable to modern Westerners unless they have actually studied to understand it. It isn’t a parable, but it wasn’t written as history, either. One of the marks is the 7 : 40 : 150 : 150 : 40 : 7 time structure, and this literary structure:
Sorry; I can think of three OT parables that have no such introduction, and at least two of Jesus’ (most famous!) parables lack one – and in fact many of Jesus’ parables are sufficiently not obviously parables that the Gospel writers had to inform the readers that Jesus was using a parable!
The most recent scholarship I’m aware of points to a common source from which both the Gilgamesh and Noah accounts came from. It would be much more accurate to say that it is obviously part of a broad ANE tradition of an actual flood.
The link with Gilgamesh was concluded when that was the only non-Noachian flood account we knew about; as I recall there are now five, including those two.
No, He didn’t – He engaged in a normal use of language where a well-known story is referenced without regard to whether or not it had actually happened.
YEC folks love to refer to the normal use of language but as you have demonstrated several times that is thrown out when the normal use is inconvenient.
That said, the Luke version does lean the heaviest towards the Flood being referenced as a real event – but that says nothing of the extent, which in the Hebrew was of the known world, or of the details of the account since it was common to embellish or adjust a story to a particular audience, which tells us that the Genesis version was likely edited to make the most impact for the Hebrews.
I wrote a paper arguing that in a grad school prep course, but in a later paper I showed how it is far more likely that the Noah, Utnapishtim, and Atrahasis accounts stem from a common source. The Genesis version is too distinctive to have been the source for all of them, while it quite nicely fits with what the early Hebrews would have understood about the common story.
That’s a significant aspect to remember: we have IIRC five different ANE Flood stories now, but from how literature was used back then it is probable that there were some three dozen versions since each city had its own version of creation, its own account of which god was greatest, and so on, and the Flood belongs to that common yet customized set of literature.
Um, no, it isn’t. If was adduced as support for the DocHyp, but stands on its own; it was put forth the moment the Gilgamesh epic was discovered, primarily because of the prevailing attitude at the time that everything in the Bible just had to be derivative, and the GE version was the first other version we had found. Given the latter and the fact that more Flood account versions have been found, making it possible to do much better comparison, the Gilgamesh connection has been pretty much toppled in favor of a common source for all.
Wow.
No, on two accounts: first, the DC was not based on any assumption about dating but was deduced from the text itself; second, if you read the LXX in Hebrew the internal evidence for sources is substantial. Where the DC folks went wrong was in taking the evidence to an extreme, trying to assign every little bit to one source or another (another manifestation of the attitude that the Hebrew scriptures had to b derivative).
Or at least a lot; it is now generally conceded that the core narratives at least come from before the kingdom period, and the evidence used to point to a much later date shows nothing more than a bit of editing at a much later date (there’s a fun argument/debate among some scholars over whether an editor could be inspired – one I find amusing since even among those who regard Mosaic authorship as likely Moses is acknowledged to be an editor, on which case editors can obviously be inspired).
All that shows is that human societies tended to arise in river valleys.
This is an example of a fact about hypotheses: just because a certain hypothesis yields an accurate prediction that doesn’t necessarily mean it is correct, because there may be other hypotheses which yield the same prediction.
Given that the Genesis text does not point to a global flood, ‘just’ a massive regional one that wiped out their known world, the hypothesis immediately above is the most likely.
Your challenge fails because the two types of literature involved are not the same. The Flood narrative is mythologized history (we today might call it theological historical fiction) while the Gospels qualify as Greek βίος (BE-ohss), a form of biography that had the intent of showing who a person was or had been.
I most certainly have. Archeology has dated the iron age to well after Noah. Unless you want to argue that the Noah and his sons “forgot” how to forge iron and so it had to be rediscovered later.
funny thing is St Roymond…the epistles of Peter are not gospels and yet Peter (in 2 peter) also quotes the flood as historical!
Despite your every effort, that argument is never going to work…cross referencing as well as the genealogies completely debunct any effort to make that claim. The lineage of Christ comes through Shem the son of Noah!
If you wish to use this argument to deny your own family tree there buddy, go right ahead! I think i have about 15.2 million Jews alive today who will disagree with you on that one (excluding descendants of Ishmael btw). And given they are actually exist, that’s pretty strong scientific evidence wouldn’t you say?
Also, the Koran speaks of Noah…
Nūḥ (Arabic: نوح, “Noah”) is the seventy-first chapter (surah) of the Quran and is composed of 28 verses (ayat).
Because of their wrongs, they were drowned, and were hurled into a Fire. They did not find apart from God any helpers.
Noah said, “My Lord, do not leave of the unbelievers a single dweller on earth.
If You leave them, they will mislead your servants, and will breed only wicked unbelievers.
So did the bible copy the Koran or the Koran copy the bible? If so, which genre should we follow and does it matter because they both agree that no one on earth besides Noah (and anyone who enters his home), survived the flood!
You see St Roymond, investigative techniques would look at the above evidences and agree that the bigger picture is true (ie that a flood came and destroyed all life on earth except for Noah and his family).
Of course we can try to prove scientifically that the eyewitness accounts are false, however, we don’t have any actual evidence in order to do that…only theory. You demand the theory must be true and the recorded accounts false or misinterpreted (despite correlating evidence that is contrary to that notion proving it wrong)
Essentially your evidence says that because “pigs can’t fly” and “dead rotted corpses cannot be brought back to life” or “ascend into heaven against gravity”… it must also be concluded that the second coming of Christ is impossible and therefore a false doctrine?(thats what must be extrapolated from your reasons for the denial of the creation and flood accounts)
You seem to go to great lengths to try to find twisted workarounds to these dilemma simply because you cannot accept its miraculous and true! That means it is you who are twisting scripture there, not YEC!
It also makes no sense whatsoever if there were going to be giant floating vegetation mats during the flood that could protect whatever life God wanted to save without it having to be on the ark. Of course those floating vegetation mats aren’t in Genesis, but if you add them to your flood model, they make the ark look just as superfluous as in the smallest local flood.
Neither the flood geology version of a global flood nor a local flood make the ark essential. Either obeying God is a good enough reason to build the ark, or it isn’t. If it is good to obey God, there’s no sense going on about the “enormous effort” that could be saved by doing something else instead.
Translating erets as “Earth” is uncommon and inaccurate. Very few translations will use a capital-E “Earth” since that is clearly beyond the bounds of the word. The lowercased “earth” is common because at least that word can have a meaning that corresponds to erets, such as “part of the surface of the globe” or “areas of land” or “the solid footing formed of soil.”
Reading kol erets as meaning the whole planet does more than make the flood worldwide. It makes the planet flat and entirely viewable from one place (Gen. 13:9). It means the planet had only one language before Babel (Gen. 11:1), so the oldest languages are all 4,000 years old and created directly by God. As has been pointed out, it also means the whole planet experienced a famine and got food from Egypt (Gen. 41:53–57). Add in these claims, and there’s hardly an area of science that flood geology doesn’t reject. It’s not at all limited to geology and biology.
Reading kol erets as the known world or the world of the writer allows the Bible to speak simply using common language for the way things appear when viewed from the cultural background of the writers. Instead of forcing a scientific meaning onto their words that would make them false, we understand them in light of what we know. “Sunrise” points to early morning, not a disproof of heliocentrism. The “firmament” is the blue dome above our heads that holds water – it doesn’t matter that our rockets don’t hit it. We treat passages about thinking with our heart and kidneys figuratively rather than as alternative biology.
Forcing their known world to equal our whole planet is as mistaken as forcing kidneys to equal brains. It’s okay for biblical writers to talk – and even have God talk – using language that makes sense in their time and culture.
I’m sure there were many floods, some of which inspired stories, two of which were brought together in the Genesis flood account. The way those two stories were edited together, unfussed by contradictions and double versions of each scene, suggests to me that preserving the correct historical details was not the point. It’s not the tenuous connection to history that makes the story inspired and worth meditating on.
Why did God tell Ezekiel to write a grisly story about God’s wife Jerusalem, even though this woman never existed (Ezek. 16)? Why did Jesus rely on so many false stories in his teaching, most of which aren’t clearly identified as parables? Maybe God knows that spoonfeeding people Truth isn’t as effective as making them work to understand it; maybe the required effort weeds out those who don’t really desire it.
there is a significant caveat to that statement…Christ and Moses both said exactly the same thing about the flood.
Moses was raised Egyptian, Christ Jewish and they lived over 1 thousand years and hundreds of miles apart. Moses was educated as a Royal prince of Egypt, Christ was educated by his mother in a poor Jewish family and lowly town (Nazareth).
The cultural argument is simply untenable given the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans are quite different in their religious beliefs and cultural habits and 1500 of years of cultural evolution separated the two (Moses and Christ).
If Moses was wrong, later writers would have said so…but none of the later bible writers did anything of the sort, rather, they agreed with him.
BTW was it Josephus who stated that he found record of a 300 B.C writer who claimed that artefacts from Noah’s ark still existed? (i was reading about this the other day…i just go and find it and update this)
UPDATE
In his work Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus, a first-century historian, wrote that the Armenians believed the remains of Noah’s Ark were located in Armenia, at the mountain of the Cordyaeans. The Armenians called this location the Place of Descent. Josephus also noted that other writers of “barbarian histories”, such as Nicolaus of Damascus, Berossus, and Mnaseas, also mentioned the Ark and the flood
Here is what Josephus actually writes on the subject in Josephus Essential Works
"The flood and the ark are mentioned by Berosus the Chaldean, who writes " portion of the vessel still survives in Armenia on the mountain of Cordyaeans, and people carry off pieces of the bitumen as talismans. Nicholas of Damascus relates the story as follows: In Armenia there is a great mountain called Baris, where many refugees found safety at the time of the flood, and one man on an ark landed at the summit. The remains of the timber were long preserved"
I have researched Berosus the Chaldean…Britannica has the following about him:
Berosus (flourished c. 290 bc) was a Chaldean priest of Bel in Babylon who wrote a work in three books (in Greek) on the history and culture of Babylonia dedicated to Antiochus I (c. 324–261 bc).
The interesting thing about the account given by Berosus, how would a Chaldean know of a Jewish folk story? Clearly the flood was not a Jewish fairytale and it extends into other cultures histories as well. Note that the Chaldean also claims the ark landed on the “summit”… that is the top of the mountain. Clearly the flood waters even by the Chaldean record rose to a great height…which is consistent with a normal reading of the biblical account.
Bart Erhman will tell you that’s because Jesus isn’t God and there is no Second Coming of Christ. Christ relied on those fairytales because he used them to trick people into becoming followers of a religious cult.
Jesus didn’t say anything about the flood that forces it to be worldwide. Matthew 24 might seem to point to a global flood with the phrase “swept them all away,” but then in Luke 17 the phrase “destroyed all of them” is used about both the flood and the destruction of Sodom. These phrases refer to everyone affected by the disaster; they don’t tell us the scope of the disaster.
Sure they’re different, but they also have much in common – including how they viewed the world. Even as an educated Greek might have known better than the average Joe, nobody had seen pictures of Earth from space.
Nobody here is saying Moses is wrong. The account naturally reads as a flood of the known world. That’s no more global than the famine in Genesis 41.
Can i ask you to actually pull out a bible concordance and note the cross referenced texts regarding the flood!
You attempt to cite, without a single reference, what you believe is the correct interpretation of the text. That is exegesis. What you should be doing is cross referencing the text and then allowing it to interpret for itself.
Now lets look at the statement Christ and the apostle Peter both make about the flood and Sodom and Gomorah…
In Matthew 24, Christ is talking about Salvation and the Second Coming (you may not agree with it, but that is the essence of the chapter). Salvation is a worldwide event (as shown in the book of Revelation by the Apostle John).
Christ then makes the following statement…
30At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven,c and all the tribes of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.d31And He will send out His angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.
After stating the above, Christ then reminds his listeners of a past historical event where people did not take note of the signs and warnings given by Noah for 120 years of preaching…
36No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,g but only the Father. 37As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. 39And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept them all away. So will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.
Now look at what the apostle Peter states…
1Now there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2Many will follow in their depravity, and because of them the way of truth will be defamed. 3In their greed, these false teachers will exploit you with deceptive words.
4For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them deep into hell,a placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; 5if He did not spare the ancient world when He brought the flood on its ungodly people, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, among the eight; 6if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction,b reducing them to ashes as an example of what is coming on the ungodly;c7and if He rescued Lot, a righteous man distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless 8(for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)— 9if all this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.
the point is, the apostle peter knows full well and tells us that this is a world wide all humanity judgement…it is not a localised event only for those in the region. He makes use of the flood of Noah to describe the global scale of it, and includes Sodom and Gomorah to highlight how the wicked will be destroyed in the final Judgement. this does not mean that the flood or the second coming are localised events… that notion is incompatible with the statement about the Second Coming. What it tells us is that there are two methods of enacting judgement in the earths history…the first time was with a flood, the second time, fire and brimstone. It is the fire and brimestone which is the finale…the entire earth will need rebuilding in a new creation after the second one, that was not the case with the flood in Noahs day. God gave humanity a second chance at the time of Noah, allowing those who entered the ark to survive a catastrophic global event, however, that will not be the case next time around. John in the book of Revelation illustrates the final judgement in exactly the same manner as Peter does.
What individuals here refuse to accept is that the entire biblical account is global…it is not localised. Sin affected all creation, not only those inside the garden of eden. The second coming of Christ and the final judgement is absolute theological proof that the wages of sin is worldwide eternal physical death. One cannot pretend the bible narrative isn’t worldwide in its entirety just because secular science (which refuses to allow for God) cannot reconcile how any of what we see around us could come into being via the spoken Word of God.
Again, reconcile that if “pigs cant fly” the idea that you are going to be saved at the second coming by rising into the air against gravity, along with dead people who were rotting corpses, and head off into outer space (a humanly unsurvivable extreme temperature vacume)
I can do that because i believe in the consistency of ALL biblical theology…that all miracles are true .
No, he doesn’t – you’re not treating language as it is normally used, you’re adding something that isn’t part of ordinary usage.
Don’t forget, by your criteria James Michener’s Alaska qualifies as history.
Is not theology and is not scholarship, and is both language- and translation-dependent.
Which is utterly irrelevant.
There’s nothing scientific about it – genealogies have been falsified and even totally invented before . . . though by your criteria maybe Caesar Augustus really was descended from Achilles.
The Quran is a batch of plagiarized works from both orthodox and heretical Christian and Jewish sources held together by the musings of a bronze-age terrorist. Is there some reason you find such a source in some way respectable?
That question tells me you have no clue what a genre is – you don’t “follow” a genre; even if you’re a writer you only use a genre (well, unless you’re a forger and don’t understand the genre your forgery has to conform to; then you might follow a checklist of what you think that genre includes).
What eyewitness accounts? Except for a very few places, nothing in the scriptures claims to be eye-witness; that’s an invention added to the text.
Absolute excrement.
Either you just get a kick from lying about people or you don’t give people here the respect of actually paying attention . . . or possibly you have your mental categories so narrow and tight that you can’t deal with others unless you slot them into one of those pigeon-holes. Whichever it may be, your above nonsense has been refuted repeatedly and I’m tired of having to repeat myself.
I don’t have any “workarounds” since I don’t need them for dilemmas you’ve invented – and (again) I don’t appreciate your lies.
Here’s a summary of what your posts in this forum say to me about what required to be a Christian:
ignore evidence
think fallaciously
insult others
lie about others
If I weren’t a Christian, your presentation at Biologos would tell me to run far away from considering being one.
