Got thinking about this painting due to the "Hudson River School" topic today.
Francis Danby, "The Deluge", 1840
Posted on 05/12/2018 4:35:00 PM PDT by pcottraux
Your entire post is pipe dreams.
Every facet of ourgeology is strong evidence of the Genesis 6 judjement.
“Gological formations” do not have ribs and timbers and rivits.
Your rejection of reality speaks to your loss of your spiritual battle.
Pathetic!
Your rejection of reality and antics around here show what a troll you are.
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Reality is all I present.
Rejection thereof has become all you do.
Time is now short, so the end of your romper room fantasies is soon to be at hand, and I can hardly wait.
It's good you've developed such a high tolerance for the taste of your own bile.
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Tolerance for your willful and contrived ignorance of reality.
Its too bad I don’t like popcorn.
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First of all, SunkenCiv, my original post has gotten some mixed responses. Mostly, people are judging it on the title alone and then knocking down a "global flood" straw man, if you will. I thank you for not doing that but I still have a strange feeling you haven't read the blog in its entirety, because I did acknowledge some issues you brought up. For example:
Woolley later retracted his identification of the Flood stratum, arguing that the deposit was too old to have resulted from the Biblical Deluge.
...which is a point I brought up. My claim isn't that Woolly factually found "Noah's Flood," it's that his discovery needs to be re-examined as a potential candidate for the real event that the flood legends sprang from. In archaeology, when a theory is abandoned, it's rarely brought up again; but I think to do so in this case would be a fruitful exercise.
One version of this claims the layer is 334 METERS thick, and of clay.
I made no such claims. I've got a diagram from Woolly's own notebook; the flood strata averages about 8 feet deep (11 feet in some areas). That doesn't sound like much until you consider that this alone is the deposit of silt, indicating a water level above of several metric tons compacting it down, and the shattered ruins of a late Ubaid-period settlement buried underneath. What's especially noteworthy is that the pottery beneath indicates a late Ubaid settlement but the pottery sherds above indicate an early Uruk period civilization. This is a telling sign at just how catastrophic this particular flood was.
If that had been anything other than a local event, it would have been discovered at the same level in every Sumerian city, indeed, would be diagnostic for dating purposes. It wasn't found, still hasn't been found. It was just a local flood of a city rather carelessly built in a flood plain.
This is a premature conclusion to jump to. You yourself said that this city was built precariously in a low-lying flood plain. Fair enough. But that to me is the best reason why it's the only place we have found a silt deposit. Evidence for floods, even destructive ones, is surprisingly hard to find. Water is precariously unpredictable and the results of raging torrents can be hard to pinpoint. Different cities in different elevations or with different topographies can have smaller deposits from the same flood, or none at all after this many thousands of years, depending on the circumstances. The question is from Ur, based on the depth of the silt strata, how big was this deluge? Woolly, after admitting it wasn't a global flood, still calculated it to have a 400 mile horizon. This would be easily large enough to cover most of Mesopotamia in the late Ubaid period. In fact, one of the tells to me that this might be the Biblical deluge is that *IF* the ark was real, it was transported 4-500 miles from Lower Mesopotamia to come to rest on the slopes of Mount Judi. And to date, Woolly's flood is the only one large enough to accomplish the task. Now imagine the effects this monstrosity would have on the late Ubaid period people as we know them. I don't find it at all implausible that this would be the real-life origin of the flood legends!
There's no common righteous man aspect to the tales, at all.
This is again a too extreme position to take. Certainly there isn't a righteous man in EVERY tale, but NONE of them? The Ziusudra epic, Atrahasis epic, Gilgamesh epic, Deucalion legend, and Noah story all tell strikingly similar stories of a righteous man saving his family and animals from the wrath of the gods on a wooden ship! And as I mentioned, another peculiar detail is in how many of them involve the flood hero becoming associated with wine in the aftermath.
In the end, I still have trouble believing that a real historical flood didn't inspire the different ancient legends, at least in regards to the civilizations to emerge from the Middle Eastern region.
Now, on to the dating and the flood's relationship with Egypt, where I'm going to open up a whole new can of worms...
How does Egypt play into the great flood and the Ark.
Egyptian history begins around 3150 BC, or 150 years before the earliest speculated date for the great flood and Noah’s Ark.
I've researched Biblical archaeology for about 2 and a half years and taught a 12 part series on it at my church. And one of my conclusions is that the origins of Egypt play into some great misconceptions.
First is your date. It's part of the traditional chronology of Egypt (Ian Shaw), but a newly revised chronology has been proposed by David Rohl. Rohl's timeline hasn't gained widespread acceptance yet, but most archaeologist are sympathetic to his premise (the chronology needs reworking) but aren't willing to take it as far as he has. His book series, including Legend: The Genesis of Civilization and A Test of Time are very engrossing reads.
According to Rohl's proposal, we've placed the dawn of Egypt too early by about 230 years. He submits a new date of 2770 for at least the dawn of the first Pharaonic dynasty. He also makes the case that the events of Genesis have been mistranslated and that they play an intimate role in the dawn of Egypt. For example, "Babel" in Genesis is actually the Sumerian city of Eridu, the dispersement of which led to the Great Sumerian Migration in the following centuries.
One of the most intriguing claims he makes in the book is that the origins of Egypt are also misrepresented by the history books. We've long understood that the Egyptians were an indigenous people who one day just became civilized. But according to the discovery at Site 26 in the Valley of the Square Boat people (named after the ancient rock graffiti scrawled on the walls), the dynastic race were Sumerian conquerors who slaughtered the indigenous people and founded Egypt in a genocide not unlike the Europeans' arrival in the Americas. The reason this never gained widespread acceptance is because it makes people uncomfortable to think of ancient Egypt; the fact that Site 26 was found in the World War II era didn't help. But the evidence is there nonetheless.
My point being that if Woolly's deluge is the great flood at 3100 BC, that predates the Pharaohs by about 400 years.
Also, there's never been a time when a single human lived 50,000 years -- but if there had been, the dating of the flood becomes a big mess. It also isn't compatible with a 6022 year old Biblical creation.
Of course it's a mess, but while I acknowledge that the Sumerian King List exaggerates the ages of its kings, it still shouldn't be discounted as a historical tool in at least figuring out the order of the Sumerian kings. In fact, an open mind can see the Biblical synchronisms: Genesis tells us that Cush was the first king of Babel after the flood, followed by Nimrod (builder of the tower). David Rohl proposes that "Cush" is a hypocoristicon of the first king after the "flood" line, MeskiagKASHer. The next king, Enmerkar (Enmer the Hunter) is the real figure behind the Biblical Nimrod.
But I've never fully bought the 6,000 year literal dating of the Bible, for a variety of reasons. For one, translating ancient Hebrew to modern English is incredibly problematic; Hebrew didn't have vowels or punctuation, and many Hebrew words have double meanings in English. For example, "aleph" could mean "thousand" or "tribal head," depending on its context (this has been used to question the English Bibles' 2-3 million population of Israel at the Exodus).
Let me go to one of Freedom's comments:
It is my understanding that God wanted to wipe clean the entire population from man and start over again with just Noah. Just 8 people - a righteous man, his wife, and descendants. The ultimate reset.
That's because, while I'm sure you ridicule fundamentalist evangelicals, you're committing the same mistake they often do; confining "The Bible" to just the modern English translations. Looking at Genesis in its original proto-Sinaitic language, a solid argument can be made for a regional flood rather than a global flood ("world" and "land" are often interchangeable)--which means the "reset" you're referring to wasn't the whole human race, but the specific bloodline through which the chosen people (the Israelites) were to emerge. Immediately after the fall, Seth's lineage is chosen to eventually bring the Israelites into existence--and their longterm purpose is to bring the Savior, Jesus, into the world. So the local flood theorist can argue that God used different judgment--the flood, the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, etc--to get idolatry out of the ancestry of Christ.
Your other points on how a global flood is problematic were completely legit, and I was going to acknowledge that, until you said this...
Got it. It’s magic.
I don't know what your beliefs are, nor do I honestly care, but this kind of arrogant sarcasm turns me off to atheism. I encounter it all the time on social media and it doesn't nothing to persuade me (it's also wrong, because "magic" and "the supernatural" aren't exactly the same things...magic is the belief that humans have the ability to control the supernatural through certain incantations. "Supernatural" just means believing in something beyond nature--and I'm a huge skeptic of philosophical naturalism, but that's another argument entirely and I'm getting off topic).
If Noah and his family are the only ones who survived the flood we are all inbred which would answer a lot of questions in todays world.
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That’s an excellent observation. We’re certainly not very sane much of the time.
I am not an atheist. I am a Christian. I just don’t believe literally every word of every tale included in the Old Testament. I didn’t think the laws of physics ceased to exist in the Old Testament.
You have added a lot. Off the top of my head I want to respond to one of your points — that a mis-translation of the bible allows for the possibility of a regional flood.
No. No way. No how. Not possible.
If possible, than the poor translation occurred multiple times in multiple instances of differently worded passages. I consider that a low probability event.
How could a poor translation change the meaning in several places from some humans to every creature on the earth, which is what the bible says including, “I will wipe out from the earth the human beings I created”, and “the end of ALL mortals has come”, “I am going to destroy them with the earth”, and “everything on earth shall perish”.
I refuse to believe 4 different passages could be misinterpreted in translation from meaning some people to all people, or some things to everything.
No, there is no way. The bible translation is unequivocal. If you want to claim otherwise, then you are going to have to list every single word of the original and how each word was mistranslated into the below.
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7 So the LORD said: I will wipe out from the earth the human beings I have created, and not only the human beings, but also the animals and the crawling things and the birds of the air, for I regret that I made them.*
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13 God said to Noah: I see that the end of all mortals has come, for the earth is full of lawlessness because of them. So I am going to destroy them with the earth.
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14 Make yourself an ark of gopherwood,* equip the ark with various compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch.
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17 I, on my part, am about to bring the flood waters on the earth, to destroy all creatures under the sky in which there is the breath of life; everything on earth shall perish.
Francis Danby, "The Deluge", 1840
With modern power tools it took over 300 man-years of labor to build each of the Ark 'replicas'.
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