this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
There's not much difference between a global flood and a flood of West Eurasia to the people living in West Eurasia, where the Bible was written.
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.
Thanks for the link, very interesting read!
Welp, this is sending me off on an hour+ wikipedia kick. Thanks!
My work here is done! ;)
Wasn't it likely the end of the ice age?
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.
If you look into flood myths, there are also hypotheses involving comet or asteroid impact flooding, which could have happened at many other times.
By the time the Greeks determined the circumference of the earth, this flood would already have been a legend and a fading cultural memory. It almost definitely would be oral history and not recorded in any physical form. What proof could anyone have that it didn't cover the whole world?
Not knowing about glaciation or interplanetary objects it would be extremely hard for the people of the era not to have decided that some spiteful god had tried to wipe out the entire earth.
The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, so 8,000 BC, which kind of makes sense considering the Biblical timeline.
How is the earth's circumference relevant to Christianity?
He's implying the writer of Genesis should have known that the flood only covered their area instead of writing the whole world. Because someone in Greece already calculated the circumference of the earth at the time.
Either way the great flood is not just documented in the Torah which is interesting, and if findings are reported as true, it's not the first documentation of the flood.
Regardless, what was written and how the actual events transpired doesn't break the writings or purpose of them in Christianity/Judaism
The thing is, even if accounts of the flood was written before the Torah was written, it just further shows that it did happen. The earth's circumference was measured in 240bc by the greeks. Which is long after the flood no matter who you ask.
Oh I wouldn't know about the earth's circumference being measured. The comment about calling Christianity backwards because of some "enlightened" idea that there were mathematicians during the time of (in their eyes) "magic" being reported is insensible. Atheists will atheist.
Yeah. Another thing is that the word used "erets" doesn't always necessarily mean the whole world. If you consider where Eden was likely located (underneath the persian gulf) it would have definitely looked like a global flood of some kind to Noah. I think to say "Bible disproven because I take the flood account fully literally" is a bit silly.