animals on the ark

The dead sea.

What I meant was the creation of the dead sea could have been the origin of the various great flood stories. They've found traces of civilization down there. Water could have flooded in and stayed in there from the med.

I think I was referring to the black sea as well. Looking at my globe right now, which still has Soviet Union written on it, it does make more sense for the black sea to be the candidate.A hundred fifty years ago, I saw a program on the discovery channel about artifacts found at the bottom of the black/dead sea which either could have been brought there by ship wreck or that a civ was once there.I am not saying that a mountain range collapsed and a wall of water descended on these people. I'm saying that for all we know what used to be a desert could turn into a pond, then a lake, then a sea in a time span of years.Now, imagine if you're a trader who have been away from home for many years. When you return to your homeland, you see a great body of water where there used to be a city. Even though it took like 5 years to flood the area, someone like you who wasn't there to see it would have thought, "wow, that was a really big flood."Over the years, oral tradition turned into myth. And what happens when a person tells a story to someone else and that someone tells the story to someone else and so on and so forth? The story gets changed. Details are exaggerated to make it more interesting. Characters are added to traumatize the situation. After several centuries of this, you can pretty much guess what happens to the original boring story of the great flood that swallowed up a city or two.This reminds me of Homer's story the Iliad. They've unearthed what they're pretty sure to be the city of Troy and they've discovered evidence that the city was once under seige and that there was a fire that destroyed it afterward. Even though the area was colonized by Alexander the great and then the romans who built layers upon layers of buildings on top of the old city, much evidence was saved.But to the point, the Iliad is filled with magical beings and gods and goddesses. What if it was based on a real war but then centuries of oral tradition have changed it so much that starting from the original boring war you end up with a war that involved supernatural beings?

For all we know, there might have been such a guy with such a boat. Instead of a big world wide flood, there was a little flood in some village somewhere. Instead of 2 of every species of animal on earth, there were like a couple of goats or whatever that guy owned. Instead of a big-ass boat, it was more like a canoe. And instead of a year, it was more like a couple of days.Now, imagine this. What if this guy just started exaggerating his story of survival when he told it to other people? What if this story was told over and over again by many different people over generations? What if the people retelling this story all added an extra detail of their own to make it more interesting?When we are talking about myths and stories that spent the first half a millenium of its life being nothing more than oral traditions, god knows where and how they originated?

Most of what's in the bible was passed on from mouth to mouth for centuries before it was written down on paper. Even then, each copy had to be copied by hand by servants of politically motivated leaders.That's not to mention that ancient hebrew ain't got no vowels, punctuation marks, or spaces in between words.