Why the diffidence? The 'seems? It’s no. Not. The Jewish Canaanites made up entirely symbolic Noah in Hebrew, overwriting Utnapishtim in Akkadian, as they upgraded to God.
I find this compelling, The Flooding of Ur: New Perspectives on an Ancient Disaster - Ancient History X
Context:
Early Holocene sea level rise - Wikipedia
Post-Glacial Sea Level - Early Holocene sea level rise - Wikipedia
Things happen at the margins, tilt, cross thresholds, between 4 & 6.
I did not feel I was shying away from it. Any of those names could be replaced with Noah. I was just saying I think they are all myths, and there was probably never any one event that inspired any of them. Just like we have alien sci fi stories nowadays all around the world and none of them was inspired by beings from space. I think they were all independently inspired by imagination. Sure the more popular ones probably helped create tropes that spread around as there became genre norms.
But I can’t be certain whoever came up with the story the first time in the Mesopotamian or Egyptian area was not some random man who heard thunder and lightening far off in the distance and knew that giant voice was a large storm coming and they were in a flash flood valley and so perhaps he survived it by clinging to a tree like some do even in America today. Maybe he had one goat with him. He survived on the tree overnight and then went around telling a story and that story became mythicized in other cultures before the story made its way to Israel. That’s where the seems and maybes came from. Not the specifics of genesis.
I just have to push Mi: We know that they are all myths. We know that there was a briefly de-civilizing regional flood around 2850 BCE, from which civilization bounced back. You don’t forget that in a hurry. And they didn’t. There were no artefacts from pre-flood Ur. 40 days and 40 nights is long enough to evacuate a city. Set up camp a few miles away from the river. There were tales of individual survival, heroism. A patriarch upstream put his farm on reed rafts. That got in the local paper: Upcountry was more dramatic. Less infrastructure. The flooding was geographic. The ruling class survived as nearly always. Propagandized everything. Consolidated their power above all. The Ziusudra - Utnapishtim - Gilgamesh myth is born, last written down 750 odd years later. And re-written TWICE that, fifteen hundred years, later by the ruling class of the Hebrew Canaanites, with their still evolving ‘Chosen People’ monotheism.
You can be certain. In normal, low key, historical, archaeological, forensic, scientific, empirical, natural, uniformitarian uncertainty. No need, no warrant, no justification, for the ‘possibility’, the maybe, the perhaps, of enchantment.
I mean yeah sure I think everyone agrees essentially that the evidence shows a freshwater flooding event, most likely from the Euphrates and Tigris around 2900bc. They reported different flooding layers and events but a major one around 2900 that left up to 11 feet of mud in some places with artifacts and so on under it. They believe this is the same flooding event that happened along a wide Mesopotamian area including Ur, Kish and Shuruppak. So a real event obviously happened. People were there when it happened and obviously some survived it, or at least some who knew the area encountered the mass destruction later on. Maybe pretended they were there and survived it or survivors the same flood event elsewhere where it was not as bad. Seems Kish was not hit as bad as others.
But these places shows floods happening periodically. Some smaller. So even those who were not in that flood event would understand what happens when the rivers flood even if they never seen it to that scale.
I know many says that oral tradition is just as powerful and strong as written stories. I struggle to see them just as powerful. I’m not certain that the actual floods in 2900 is the same floods mentioned in the list of Sumerian kings 800 years later or the same as the ones mentioned here that was written around a thousand years later or more. Is it possible that for 700 years a great flood was talked about all going back to the flooding of 2900bc? Maybe. But I can’t be certain that instead what we see is an area that witnessed a lot of flooding for centuries on and off, most not that horrible, and so they come up with an idea of a massive flood story.
For me we all have stories in horror and sci fi, and a general human fear of a large asteroid just barreling into earth. Tons of books, campfire tales and movies have been done about it. Many have witnessed craters from them that are huge. Some have even died by chance from small space rocks hitting them. We have science to show us a massive meteorite pounded into the earth towards the end of the dinosaurs reigns. But I still think all the sci fi horror stories are not really inspired by someone’s own fear of an event being passed on but imagination going wild over something they see the aftermath of.
I didn’t think there were any verified cases of people being killed by meteorites.
Of course, I imagine there have been people killed by weapons forged from meteorites, so, indirectly, perhaps 
A couple of lines of that melody are lifted straight from another song . . . which remains stubbornly elusive to my memory – but maybe an Elton John tune? No . . . Billy Joel? Hmmm . . . they both play piano well . . .
That’s it – two lines of melody match Piano Man!
“Let my vegetables go!” – brilliant!
That’s an excellent point, easily and often forgotten. The Bible’s worldview is radically different from ours . . . and given that God used it to speak to those before us, it behooves us to study that worldview, if only to understand what the Bible really says!
That is fascinating in a way because until the mid-1800s or so scientists insisted that rocks couldn’t fall from the sky (actually a lingering bit of Aristotle there).
Geologically physically impossible. There’s not enough water in earths systems to cover the earth and the highest mountains. What about the animals such as the Quala bear who lives off of eucalyptus leaves how did they store it aboard the boat and where did they get the bamboo for the Pandas, how did the Australian animals get to the Middle East to climb aboard the ark. How did a crew of eight manage the waste from all the “Kinds”. In 4 thousand years how did we end up with millions of species? It’s a great story theologically, a symbol of salvation redemption and telling the people to stop sinning. Let’s not forget the epic of Gilgamesh, this narrative came before the writing of the Genesis story of the Ark. True faith is not afraid of the truth. Science wins this one - but God triumphs over all.
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