In the Bibles defense, it didn’t just rain:
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. Genesis 7:11
So, like, most of the water probably came from underground, not from the rain. Though I’d imagine both were pretty bad.
Not saying the story is true or anything. Just pointing out the straw man, since the Bible doesn’t claim all the water was from rain.
If the Black Sea theory is correct, it wasn’t even a global flood, but it would have seemed like the end of the world for anyone caught in it.
There’s a number of places where Old Testament stories may actually be describing the stories of Bronze Age Libyans who end up relocated into the Southern Levant along with the sea peoples. Joseph with a colorful coat and an interpreter of dreams is sometimes likened to the Hyskos but compare the coat vs the depiction of the Libu. Not only are the Libu sporting blue in their coats, like the tekhelet later found in the OT, there’s even the Tuareg Libyan people known for their blue dye and matriarchal lineage.
Around the time that tomb image is recorded there’s even a papyrus talking about how the followers of Set have red hair and interpret dreams, and this is also the period when the Egyptian story “A Tale of Two Brothers” emerges with a number of similarities to the Joseph story.
This is interesting in light of the flood mythos because we now know that at the end of the ice age there was a migration down from Europe across the ice bridge to North Africa. This was around the time there really was coastal flooding including relatively rapid events which may have even persisted in local oral traditions.
Part of the issue with analysis of Biblical stories in terms of historicity (outside of the supernatural stuff) may be that we’re analyzing a collection of stories that had been syncretized into a local tradition and later appropriated, much like the story of ‘Israel’ (Jacob) taking the birthright and blessing of Esau (the eponymous founder of Edom, meaning ‘red’) in the Bible.
In fact, according to the Dead Sea scroll fragment 4Q534 Noah had red hair.
So it need not even necessarily be that there was flooding in the Southern Levant for the flood mythos to be based on an oral tradition.
All that said, personally I’m rather persuaded by Idan Dershowitz’s analysis that the Noah story was originally a story of drought and famine before syncretizing the Babylonian flood mythos into it later on and transforming it into a flood epic.
Isn’t that about 10,000 years before that?
The Red Sea flood makes way more sense (ha). Especially when you consider what peoples’ sense of “the whole world” was at the time.
Though some thinkers did already know the circumference of the earth, which make Judaism and Christianity sound even more ass backwards when you consider it all.
Yes, it’s not only rain even as per Quran
“At length, behold! there came our Command, and the fountains of the earth gushed forth.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:40
and
“O Earth! swallow up your water, and O Sky! withhold your rain! and the water abated and the matter was ended. The Ark rested on Mount Judi.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:44
Fair point! Its been a while since I heard this in my childhood, but I remember them explicitly telling us “it rained” without any other source.
Granted, we were children lol but if the artist had a Sunday school like mine then that likely is the basis for missing that bit 🙃
In the Bible’s offense, it probably wasn’t even originally a flood story.
It’s actually plausible. There is now evidence to suggest that the earth having 3x more water inside it than on it.
No it isn’t. Geology does not back up a global flood.
When it rains a lot and the ground gets saturated it can seem like the water is coming up from the ground. Also you know they had wells so they knew water is in ground.
It isn’t though. A worldwide flood would leave behind plenty of evidence in the geologic record. That it doesn’t exist makes it quite implausible. Making matters worse is the supposed time of the flood had many civilizations with extensive records for hundreds of years before and after forget to mention they were wiped out and instead just continued living through the flood without noticing it.
This relates to the bible concept of firmament, flat earth and separation of waters, as in genesis when it says god separated waters above and below.
The nomads knew wells, rain, islands, tides and flooding rivers, so the world they conceptualised was one where God moved water above and below to reveal dry land. As such in the story it seemed logically consistent to allow massive amounts of water to come from above and below returning the world in what they considered a previous, erased state to reboot it.
There are so many inconsistencies with this stuff, but what bothers me most is something else. The whole thing is just needlessly cruel to all living beings, many of which did nothing wrong. An omnipotent god could have done something way less cruel and way more efficient if it wanted to.
The Old Testament doesn’t do a lot to give the idea that god is “benevolent” or “kind”
Cruelty was kinda the schtick
Anyone interested in this, I suggest listening to the “Data over dogma” podcast.
The Bible is a book with multiple authors that had completely different conceptions of God and that borrowed local traditions for their own.
For example, the belief in one god is believed by scholars to be a later change to the Bible. In that region, it would be more common for the belief to be that there’s a God of a land or nation with their power bound to that land. The world was viewed as one with a battle of the gods rather than being one with a supreme ruler.
This is why the Bible so often disagrees with itself. Because each author had their own motives and were sometimes responding to each other in their writings.
Well, omnipotency is out, I believe. An omnipotent god needs, by definition, be equally able and likely to be exceedingly cruel as wellwilling. The question is, why would such a god hav given Noah the task of building an arc in the first place?
And the question of humanities “free will” is another nail in the coffin. Either humans only have free will for as much as whatever whim the omnipotent god allows for, or of the free will is immutable, then there is one thing the “omnipotent” god can’t do, and thus omnipotence is out…
An omnipotent god needs, by definition, be equally able and likely to be exceedingly cruel as wellwilling.
How do you figure that?
As i said, by definition. If there is anything holding such a deity from doing one thing, or the other, it is unable to do all things, thus not omnipotent.
I am being pedantic here, but “cruelty” doesn’t seem like quite the right word. If you made something, like a drawing or a story, and then got rid of it, the point isn’t to cause suffering, but rather to throw it away. “Indifference” would fit better. And… either way, a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work? “Omnipotent” there being a relative word, that the ancient people’s would not have been able to distinguish b/t forms like your more common garden-variety space alien (e.g. 2001 Odyssey) all the way up to external-reality entity (e.g. The Matrix).
Anyway my point is that it is people who are the ones that are cruel, b/c we are no better than anyone else, yet we delight in causing suffering. The only other animal I have ever heard of who shares that trait is the Chimpanzee, who btw also just so happens to be the closest living relative that humans have on this planet. \s on that being a coincidence ofc, when we share ~99% genetic similarity.
a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work?
What is different between this and a mother or father killing their own child because they ‘created’ it? I would say that if you create a thing with feelings, thoughts, flesh, and blood, you have the responsibility to take care of that thing, and if you don’t that is cruel.
DO parents create their children, really, or do they just FAAFO? But if you write a computer program, don’t you have rights to it? The latter is a thorny question indeed, if it develops sentience. So it seems like both yes, at a lower level, but then no once it rises to a similar level as you. Similar to how an embryo or even more so an unfertilized egg is not a “person” yet (except in the Southern USA), but an adult is. Or some people may argue that Might Makes Right, which most of us would disagree with, but e.g. the likes of Putin would still push forth. So there is indeed no consensus there, and likely never will be. But my main point here, besides simply listing some of these factors involved, is to say that the act of Creation seems to involve more than just fucking, even knowing full well that a child would result from that act - full Creation involves a much deeper commitment, hence a higher degree of ownership.
They did do something wrong though, or else they would have been on the ark with Noah.
How would that work out for the animals? Did every single one commit sins except for one male and one female of every species?
We also don’t talk about the fact that the only humans that were saved was a family. Who repopulated the earth.
Like, with Adam and Eve and their offspring, the implication is that they inbred because literally no other humans existed. Still pretty gross, but the second time it happened was just abject laziness on God’s part. Like your omnipotent ass couldn’t have at the very least picked a few more families.
I think I figured the math on the assumption that Noah’s kids brought significant others with and it was technically possible to avoid parent-child pairings so long as each unrelated male female combination was utilized, which is to say they screwed each others wives in addition to their own. Not like the bible gives a fuck about parent child incest babies, that was Lot’s whole character arc.
The animals, on the other hand, those are all shit out of luck.
Slight disagreement. With Adam and Eve it is implied that there were other people about. Which is why Cain complains that if he is cast out someone will murder him. And why it isn’t clear who the males are mating with.
The current understanding is that this was the origin story for those people and they thought pretty much every tribe around them had their own god with their own origin story. Later on retrocons left plot problems.
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He just delegated that to Noah. But Noah doesn’t quite have the same air of authority as fucking God, so of course nobody believed him until it started flooding. Even if it wasn’t God who told him about it, like maybe he was just really good at predicting the weather or something, I could see the same thing happening.
The ark story doesn’t necessarily mean that all of sea level rise was result of rainfall.
Domino collapse of glaciers have been known to raise sea levels extremely quickly.
There was even a theory by a palentologist (which I cant currently find) of an ice dam left over from an ice age which separated two major parts of the ocean, which had different sea levels. When the ice dam eventually collapsed, the oceans would have reached equilibrium in a matter of days. Given the chaotic history of plate tectonics and ice ages, this isnt an unreasonable theory. Imagine if the mouth of the Mediterranean was frozen over, and the body evaporated down to lower levels, and people settled there. Then the ice wall collapsed.
Im not saying any of this explains a ridiculous bible story, just that, as a scientist, its short-sighted to assume rainfall was the only possible contributor to the flood.
“The world” back then also was something like a town and its surrounding villages. It probably just rained really heavy for a few days, flooded some village in a way that never happened before and the only explanation was “God’s wrath”.
I believe most of religious stories can be explained by people talking shit.
There was a flood after the meditteran salinity crysis, which happened partly due to lowered pressure in the nord causing the ground in the south to recede after the ice was gone (think of pressing in a balloon). There was a theory that the black sea flood (was half as big prior) due to this was what we know as the great flood, with humanity living mostly around there at the time, but i think it was refuted, because the flooding happened over generations there.
The thing with glacier seas happened mostly in scandinavia, gb, up there, creating the english channel (the heck? German it is Ärmelkanal).
There’s another, funner, theory, whereby a feedback loop in tectonic movement makes the plate boundaries heat up and the plates move ever faster (for a while till it calms down again). The ocean floor thereby becomes hot and more buoyant on the mantle beneath - so ocean floor rises and continents sink.
That theory is backed up by some proper plate simulation by a respected scientist, but as far as I know it was never developed past the initial simulation work and intriguing result.
I don’t understand why a wooden ark would melt like sugar under any circumstances.