Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dora Smith" <villandra AT austin.rr.com>]

You guys are familiar with the northern Syrian versions of the flood story,
such as that at Ugarit, right?   They are more similar to the Biblical flood
story than are teh Mesopotamian versions.  There was extensive discussion on
the AncientBibleHistory list.

I recorded and I think also found an online transcription of a recent TV
show tha I recently saw for the second time, that makes a good case for
believing that the story is actually based on the experiences of a king of a
Mesopotamian city who worked as a river merchant, with a rare extreme summer
river flood.    Storm swept the man and his family with his large load of
animals, wine and produce out to sea, he was ruined, and forced to settle on
some place on the Mediterranean!

In any case, the only evidence for worldwide flooding can be pinned down
within no fewer than a few thousand years.   Tehre was a time for several
thousand years after the end of the last ice age when there was alot of
extensive flooding worldwide, as sea levels rose.   There is extensive
evidence that some of it flooded the I think Black Sea, and drowned out much
of an ancient agricultural land there.    These events ended not long before
the beginnings of recorded memory (in myths written down when people began
to write).

Flood story as told in the Bible is not only shaped into the Deuteronomistic
ideological framework, but so stylized that it is hard to know what even the
version that these writers had originally looked like!    It must have taken
some distortion of what they had to work with to produce such close
parallels between the creation account and the flood story, with the ruach
and the firmament and all that.

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, Texas
villandra AT austin.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
To: "Robert K Brumbelow" <lomeint5 AT yahoo.com>
Cc: "Hebrew" <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 5:33 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Eden


> On 14/06/2004 03:03, Robert K Brumbelow wrote:
>
> >
> > ...
> > Peter,
> >     You can say that, yet I have been in the mountains in Colorado and
> > in the Alps and in both places I have found sedimentary rock. That to
> > me is pretty strong evidence of a world wide flood. Further I live in
> > North Central Texas hundreds of miles from the nearest coast and
> > hundreds of feet above current mean sea level where almost all of our
> > stone deposits are sedimentary. Now my understanding is that
> > sedimentary rock only forms under a liquid such as water. ...
>
>
> Yes, of course there is sedimentary rock in very high places, indeed
> right at the top of the highest mountains. Some sedimentary rock is laid
> down by rivers and in lakes, or by wind (sand dunes don't need water,
> but they become sedimentary rock), but indeed most of it is laid down by
> the sea, and some of this is found on the highest mountains. If you ask
> geologists who have spent their life studying this, the reason is that
> this land has been lifted up, by earthquakes and more gradual processes,
> over periods of millions of years, and simultaneously gradually worn
> away by water, ice, wind etc until in many places only mountain peaks
> remain.
>
> > ... I would not be so quick to divorce faith and science. it has been
> > my own personal experience that when one is in conflict with the other
> > its because of a misunderstanding or bad facts.
>
>
> I don't want to divorce faith and science, but I do want to show up bad
> science for what it is. There are too many people who decide in advance
> what conclusions they want to find (often, but not always, based on
> faith but often with a lot of their own preconceptions of what the Bible
> etc means mixed in) and then find some pseudo-scientific means of
> reaching that conclusion. Very often this science is transparently bad
> to anyone (like me) with a degree in science and a critical mind.
>
> And to bring this back to biblical Hebrew etc, the same principle
> applies in physical science as in linguistics, archaeology etc: if you
> reach a conclusion which is quite different from that of the established
> scholars in the field (whether geologists, theologians, archaeologists
> or whoever), you may be right, but you need to make very sure that you
> are if your result is to be accepted by anyone except for an uncritical
> fringe.
>
> --
> Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
>
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