Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Walter,
>
> I am not aware of this latest information. I am aware that a book was
> recently released claiming that the basis of Noah's Flood was a change in
> water levels of the Black Sea. But this is not in the area of Shuruppak in
> Lower Mesopotamia, where the earliest Fllod story is situated in the
> Sumerian account of the Flood and its later Babylonian spin-offs, including
> the biblical.

Once again we have several assumptions here.  First, we don't
know that the Sumerian is the earliest flood story.  It's the earliest
surviving flood story that we have found.  Second, it's pure
assumption to refer to the biblical account as a Babylonian spin-off.
I know this is what the conventional wisdom of the history-of-
religions school says, but it's by no means certain and without a
host of other unsupportable assumptions, it's not in the least
provable.  The fact is that we don't know where the nearly-global list
of flood traditions originated, since such stories are found all over
the world in cultures that had no conceivable contact with Sumeria.
There is no scientific reason why the story couldn't have originated
in a region such as the Black sea (or somewhere on the other side
of the globe, for that matter) and migrated to the Fertile Crescent.
The fact that the Sumerian story is the earliest mesopotamian one
that we have proves nothing about the origins of the idea itself.

Because Humanist scholars understand the biblical account to
> derive from the Sumerian and Babylonian accounts, most Humanist scholars *do
> not take seriously* the claims of a change in water levels of the Black Sea
> being behind the biblical account.

And the humanist scholars don't really have a leg to stand on in
this idea, because it is just as easy to understand that the
Sumerian and Babylonian accounts derived from an earlier form of
the biblical one, or that they all derived from a common source
much earlier than any of the surviving records.  You place far, far
too much faith in humanist scholarship, because you yourself have
shown again and again that most of it is built on unsupported
assumptions.

Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"Éist le glór Dé."