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Author Topic:   Commonalities Of Accounts Of A Universal Flood?
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 1 of 92 (353651)
10-02-2006 2:31 PM


It has been claimed on another thread:
Actually, the amazing fact that there are so many ancient stories of a gigantic flood is unbelievably strong corroboration. The attempts to reduce them all to local floods, as if they all just happened to experience these memorable local floods about the same time that made this huge impact on their consciousness, apart from all the OTHER big floods they must also have experienced over the millennia, is really laughable.
This raises a number of interesting questions.
How widespread are stories of a universal flood?
What do they have in common besides a big flood?
Do they occur only in areas where local flooding is known to have taken place, or are they present elsewhere?
My thanks to anyone who cares to inform me.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 14 of 92 (353735)
10-02-2006 8:12 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by Faith
10-02-2006 7:35 PM


The universality of flood stories, were they all merely local events, should be matched by a universality of all kinds of disaster stories, it seems to me. Where are the universal earthquake stories...
An excellent question!
this website lists earthquake legends from India, Assam, Mexico, Siberia, Mozambique, Tennessee, West Africa, Mongolia, Latvia, Romania, and West Africa.
This website has a similar list, but adds in Japan, Greece, Belgium, Columbia, and East Africa.
Not only do many of these myths have common elements, but some also have elements in common with flood myths; e.g. in the Belgian earthquake myth, earthquakes are sent by the gods to punish men's wickedness (as in the Bible); in one Central American myth, the gods send earthquakes to deal with human overpopulation (as in the Babylonian story of Atrahasis' ark).
The fact that such stories exist in such numbers is very likely an indication of a universal memory. The fact that many of them are distorted and embellished with local gods just reflects the imperfection of memory and reason, plus a dollop of local pride.
The Bible account is remarkable for its LACK of embellishment.
It mentions what was at that time a purely local god. If that is a feature of embellishment, then why should we not suppose the Hebrew version to have been embellished?
I'm not sure about "forest fire stories". People don't usually live in forests, and surely those that did would have a fairly good idea of what started forest fires (i.e. the thunder god hurling his lightning hammer).

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 42 of 92 (353814)
10-03-2006 5:17 AM
Reply to: Message 22 by Faith
10-02-2006 9:03 PM


In other words they are not about one huge worldwide earthquake.
You are wrong. Almost every myth I've cited claims that earthquakes are worldwide; just like the Noachim flood is claimed to be worldwide.

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 Message 22 by Faith, posted 10-02-2006 9:03 PM Faith has replied

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 43 of 92 (353881)
10-03-2006 11:42 AM
Reply to: Message 42 by Dr Adequate
10-03-2006 5:17 AM


To elaborate on my previous post: if you look at some typical earthquake myth:
"A gigantic frog which carried the world on its back, twitched periodically, producing slight quakes."
This presupposes that the mechanism for earthquakes causes the whole Earth to quake.
I recollect that your computer is making it hard for you to follow links right now, but I assure you this is typical of the quake myths we've looked at.
You are right that there is no conflation of earthquakes into a single event. I think this is easily explained. In all my life I've never seen even a mild flood, let alone a dangerous one; however, living in England, far from any fault lines, I've experienced several earthquakes in my lifetime. A mythical explanation for earthquakes has to explain them as an occasional event.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 50 of 92 (353927)
10-03-2006 2:42 PM


Stealing Fire From Heaven
I googled to find out about legends concerning fire, and I didn't find any of destruction by fire, but I found a lot about the aquisition of fire.
And it's all ... strangely similar ...
(1) Fire is stolen.
(2) It is almost always stolen by a being neither a human nor a god.
(3) It is almost always stolen on behalf of someone else, most usually the whole world or the entire human race, or animals and humans collectively.
(4) The thief is almost always male.
(5) The theft is almost always from supernatural beings. If the thief is in some way supernatural, then the theft is very often from beings which are in some way "more supernatural" than the thief. The theft is often "from the gods" or "from heaven".
(6) The thief is often what anthropologists apparently call a "trickster-hero"; he is famous for other feats of guile besides this one.
(7) The thief is fairly often burnt and permanently marked (and his offspring, if any) by his experience.
(8) Almost always, the thief goes unpunished; with one very famous exception.
Let me give you some links. Brief synopses are provided for the benefit of Faith, but please get your computer fixed.
Apache: Fox steals fire "for the world" *
Australian: The robin steals fire from the cockatoo, but it gets out of hand and becomes common property. *
Brittany (France): The fire-crested wren steals fire (details rather scanty) *
Caroline Islands (Pacific): Olofat, trickster hero, forces his way into heaven and sends a bird to carry fire to humans from heaven. *
Cherokee: Rabbit steals fire from the weasels out of compassion for humans *
Choctaw: Grandmother Spider steals fire out of compassion for humans and animals, but only humans learn how to use it. *
Greece: Prometheus steals fire out of compassion for humans *
India: Matarisvan steals fire from the sky, entrusts it to humans *
Khoi-San ("Bushman", S. Africa) : Mantis steals fire from the ostrich and gives it to the Bushmen. *
Klamath : Coyote steals fire from the Fire Beings out of compassion for humans * *
Lappland: A stag steals fire on behalf of the whole world (details scanty) *
Mayan: The first men steal fire from the gods *
Polynesia: Maui steals fire (sometimes from the gods, large number of variants) *
Zimbabwe: Rukuba (a dog) steals fire from the god Nyamurairi on behalf of the hero Nkhango *
This is just a sample; I gave up compiling the Native American ones 'cos there are so many of them. If you're wondering how many more there are in Europe, consider that since the myth is found both in India and Greece, it's most likely ur-Indo-European.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 65 of 92 (354492)
10-05-2006 3:58 PM


Faith specifically claimed (as quoted in the OP) that the flood reports all put the flood at about the same time. I can see no evidence for this in any of the links I've followed. Is there any basis for this claim?

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 73 of 92 (354593)
10-05-2006 9:19 PM
Reply to: Message 70 by Hyroglyphx
10-05-2006 7:11 PM


. These were words were written nearly 2,000 years ago which gives him and his era a far greater insight to the histories of the world than you or I.
No, not really. For one thing, his sources of information were limited to a small geographical area --- he didn't know that most of the world even existed. He says that these flood stories were known to the Phoenicians and the Chaldeans; Middle Eastern people. Chaldeans are just Babylonians; Phoenicians speak a Canaanite language like Hebrew.
Here's a map showing Chaldea, Jerusalem, and Tyre (a Phoenician city).
A modern ethnographer could find a much wider spread of stories about Santa Claus than Josephus produces to testify to the flood.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 76 of 92 (412301)
07-24-2007 10:52 AM


Hypothesis #4
Suppose someone in a pre-scientific society were to reason like this:
I can see that there are widespread marine fossils. I deduce that they were once covered by water. I can see that there are such fossils in the highest mountains I know, and of course he flood required for this would have covered all low-lying areas. I can therefore deduce one universal flood, and by parsimony I need not multiply this and suppose there were several without additional evidence.
Now, as I and all my tribe know, the weather is caused by supernatural beings --- those same beings who spread out the clouds
[cf Job 36:29] whose shouting makes the thunder [cf 2 Samuel 22:13] and who make earthquakes by shaking the Earth's foundations [cf Psalms 18:7]. Hence, this flood was also the act of a god. As such a flood would have wiped out such civilization as there then was, the god in question must have been wrathful about something.
However, obviously some people survived, since there are people living now. So either they took shelter on high ground, or had a boat, or floated on driftwood
[all of which possibilities appear in the corpus of flood myths]. Given, as we have deduced, that the god who caused the flood was wrathful, the survivors must have been better than the usual run of men in order to survive.
As land animals survived, presumably the people took the animals with them in their boat [if it's a boat in this particular flood myth].
In short, if you want to independently invent a myth very similar to Noah's flood, all you need is:
* a superficial knowledge of the fossil record;
* no knowledge of the modern geological sciences;
* a willingness to attribute the unexplained to the actions of a deity.
(Do we know anyone like that?)
Hence, this sort of reasoning could have taken place in pretty much any pre-scientific society, explaining the widespread distribution of similar flood myths.
I don't see how Young Earth Creationists can object to this hypothesis, since the line of reasoning which I have reconstructed above is one which they claim is basically correct and should be followed; in which case it would not be surprising if different people round the world had independently come to essentially the same conclusion as "flood geologists".
Edited by Dr Adequate, : Grammar --- ouch!

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 77 of 92 (412456)
07-24-2007 8:13 PM


By the way, I know that with me it's sometimes hard to figure out whether I'm making a subtle joke or whether I'm putting up a serious hypothesis.
This time, it's a serious hypothesis. I would be pleased if anyone would try to shoot it down.

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 78 of 92 (412580)
07-25-2007 1:11 PM


Look, could someone try to falsify my hypothesis?
It's my own idea, it's not something I've read somewhere, and I'm interested to know if my idea is any good.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 83 of 92 (413835)
08-01-2007 2:48 PM
Reply to: Message 82 by WhatWouldDarwinDo
08-01-2007 2:45 AM


Re: One Global flood, or countless local floods?
Welcome to the forums!
Another perspective to consider (I haven't made my way through all of the posts on this string, so this may or may not have been previously mentioned) is the mindset of the author(s) behind the story we now know. It has been assumed, and it would seem rather recently in history, that the story as mentioned in the bible refers to a large global event, when in fact there isn't any mention of such in the story. Even scholars, such as Leonardo Da Vinci seemed to have problems corroborating the flood story from the bible, preferring to find a natural explanation for why there were fossils of sea creatures found on mountaintops (something that Stephen Jay Gould has written about and covered more extensively). Why is it so important for biblical literalists and creationists to maintain that the story in the bible is global?
With the best will in the world, I don't see how the story can be read as anything but a description of a universal flood. God says he's going to wipe living things off "the face of the earth", we're told that the waters covered the mountains, and of course there's not really any point in Noah saving two of every kind of animal if the flood is merely local.
Your claim that the universality of the flood is a recent interpretation I find surprising. If you have any references showing that people in, say, the Middle Ages thought that it was localised, I'd be interested to see them.

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 Message 82 by WhatWouldDarwinDo, posted 08-01-2007 2:45 AM WhatWouldDarwinDo has replied

Replies to this message:
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 Message 86 by WhatWouldDarwinDo, posted 08-02-2007 1:17 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 89 of 92 (414230)
08-03-2007 2:50 PM
Reply to: Message 85 by WhatWouldDarwinDo
08-02-2007 1:08 AM


Re: One Global flood, or countless local floods?
Of course there is merit to Noah saving two (or seven) of every kind of animal, you only need look to what the story itself is about ... Long story short, god killed of all of mankind with the exception of Noah, because Noah did what god wanted him to without question.
And this would require a global flood, wouldn't it?
As for it being 'recent,' I make reference to the wave of literal interpretation, having its roots in the Fundamentalist movement which only goes back a few centuries.
It is true that hardline literalism is fairly recent, but not with respect to the Flood; in that case the local interpretation is recent.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 90 of 92 (414231)
08-03-2007 2:52 PM
Reply to: Message 84 by bdfoster
08-01-2007 5:34 PM


Re: One Global flood, or countless local floods?
Also the use of universal language was appears to have been different in the ancient near east. Later in Genesis it says that "all the earth" came to buy grain from Joseph.
Point.
Nonetheless, you couldn't have a flood which covers the mountains without it covering all lower-lying areas.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 91 of 92 (414232)
08-03-2007 2:57 PM
Reply to: Message 86 by WhatWouldDarwinDo
08-02-2007 1:17 AM


Real Flood Geology
As I mentioned before, I live in an area of the United States that is well-known for its unique geology and geography called the Channeled Scablands. This region, forming most of the geography of eastern Washington is rife with signs of a massive flooding event, some so large that the only way they could be seen was by airplane. This includes such things as ripple marks, erratic boulders, strandlines, gravel deposits, dry falls, etc. These features were carved out of basalt and granite (not soft rock types, mind you) from flooding events (somewhere between 40 to perhaps 100 separate events) stemming from Glacial Lake Missoula. These are catastrophic events (if I recall, the amount of water transported through the Columbia River channels through to the Pacific Ocean equaled more than the output of many of the world's longest rivers today at one time) that lasted for weeks to perhaps months, and had the potential to completely erase and reform the landscapes it touched.
Most interesting, thank you.
Why do we not see these signs associated with Noah's flood?
You're asking me? Because it didn't actually happen.

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