Posted on 04/08/2010 8:15:01 PM PDT by truthfinder9
Or is the Epic of Gilgamesh a bad rewrite of the biblical account?
Thank you. Great Flood stories have been a part of many civilizations.
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nonsense.
Abraham was from Ur, and Gilgamesh was a pre historic king in the Sumerian region of what is now Iraq (same area of the world).
If the flood happened, it was probably about the time of the global warming/glacial melt about 10000 BC when there was lots of floods, and climate change.
So there is an oral tradition for 7000 years before they wrote down Gilgamesh, and 8500 years before they wrote the bible down. Both probably tell of the same flood and the same survivors.
Most Christians (e.g. most Catholics, orthodox, and main line Christian) don’t think the Bible is dictated by God: (that is the Koran) and agree it was probably a local flood, not the whole world (there was a catastrophe that wiped out humanity, but that story goes back 50000 years to where most of mankind was wiped out by a super volcanic eruption, if the DNA studies are correct).
The story is how God communicated with his people, and the realization that there was a good God who ruled over all things, not made up gods who were petty and destroyed men for the fun of it.
The Sumerian Gods were evil and disliked men; the God of Abraham loved man and promised that he would never destroy man again.
uh, Catholics don’t believe that the bible is literal...since the days of the early church fathers it was recognized that a lot of the stories were stories for our eddification, not history or science lessons.
The Epic of Gilgamesh could be from the same original source as the Genesis account of the flood, but had a lot added to the telling.
Wish I had more time, but must turn in.
Numbers like seven and Forty do not have our significance. As to what says says, well, speculations have huge floods happing at the end of the ice age.
For instance, the seabed of the Mediterranean is to have been a desert until the inland sea whose remnant is the Black Sea, was inundated when the rising waters broke through at the Dardanelles. A natural explanation is that Genesis has a cataclysmic historical event embedded in a story about human beings and the God of the Bible. The story is related to the Creation stories and aims to identify the God of the Creator God, as a righteous God who is offended by man’s sins but always offers them hope for reconciliation. The gods of the Mesopotamian myth, like the Olympian gods, are quite a different sort.
“Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” (Genesis 8:20)
Typical of much in the Bible is things that the human mind cannot comprehend. If Noah took two of every kind of clean animal and clean bird into the Ark, and now sacrificed one of each, the human mind does not comprehend how the animals and birds would have repopulated the earth. Or the existence of pigs and carrion birds.
God is Infinite and Can do all things. It is not for us to question.
This mind comprehends that there was more than a breeding pair of each kind of clean animal and taken aboard the ark.
There were seven of each clean animal, not seven pairs, and seven pairs of each clean bird, if I’m not mistaken.
Some would have the petty, vengeful, randy “gods” of old be those that would be gods recorded in antediluvian times, Biblically. That they were nephilim, the great men of old, men of renown.
“This mind comprehends that there was more than a breeding pair of each kind of clean animal and taken aboard the ark.
There were seven of each clean animal, not seven pairs, and seven pairs of each clean bird, if I’m not mistaken.”
6:19 And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring TWO of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.
6:20 Of the birds after their kind, and of the animals after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, TWO of every kind shall come to you to keep them alive.
7:2 You shall take with you of every clean animal by SEVENS, a male and his female; and of the animals that are not clean TWO, a male and his female;
7:3 also of the birds of the sky, by SEVENS, male and female, to keep offspring alive on the face of all the land.
7:9 there went into the ark to Noah by TWOs, male and female, as God had commanded Noah.
The twos refer to the ones that will be kept alive; while the sevens are pairs. Else why male and female?
The whole world retains the flood story and associates it with roughly the same time period i.e. around 3500 - 4000 years ago. It was a global event, affecting every corner of the earth other than mountain peaks.
That seems to be a leading alternative. I am not sure though that it would produce in the Mideast the violent storms associated with Noah’s adventure.
That seems too old an event — about five million years ago.
There....fixed it.
You can thank me later.
I thank you now.
Whole gene pool was on that boat. The memory would filter to every culture.
Duh.
I figured it was a race memory. Many cultures, not just those in the eastern Med, have a flood story, and that long ago, pretty much everyone was fairly near there. It certainly would have made an impression on anyone who saw it. Granted, though, that to the best of our scientific knowledge, the “humans” around at that time were little differentiated from ordinary apes.
If the Biblical flood account is true (and it is) wouldn’t one expect other cultures to have handed down accounts of it which became mythic over the centuries? I think the fact the Gilgamesh epic exists enhances the credibility of the Bible epic.
There is evidence of the Gilgamesh flood. Noah not so much.
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