Source of biblical flood water?

An idle thought - What was the Hebrew word used? I ask merely because in the Chaldean cosmology, the waters that were divided into heaven and Earth were seperated by a layer of tin...http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mythology/sumer-faq/

Well there's a thing. At least it explains what happened to Beagle 2...

How hard did you look?http://www.headcoverings-by-devorah.com/TorahCommentary.html
"Rashi comments: "This means, let the sky (firmament) become hardened."http://www.asa3.org/...pics/Bible-Science/PSCF6-97Seely.html
As to the solidity of the firmament, the historical context is that all peoples in all parts of the world including the ancient Near East, from the beginning of history until 200 A.D. (and almost all peoples after that until modern times) believed that the sky, the firmament, was rock-solid; they distinguished this rock-solid firmament from the atmosphere. The burden of proof lies on anyone saying that the Hebrews did not do the same. (Emph. mine)You may also want to look at IBSS - The Bible - Genesis 1 and scroll down to "Creation of the Firmament"

It's that whacky fundamental inerrancy. The Bible has to be 100% accurate: If it's demonstably self conflicting (like Jesus' infamous last words) or demonstably wrong (like the bat-birds in Lev.) then it's a 100% accurate metaphor.That bits of it might just, conceivably, been written 4500 years ago by desert nomads who'd never been more than 6 feet from ground level isn't a viable option.This message has been edited by Dead Parrot, 04-20-2005 03:00 AM

Yes, I didn't make myself very clear - I meant the the original legends Gen. is based on. I'm not going to get into the Chaldean-older-or-younger debate (that way lies madness) but I'm assuming they both (ahem) evolved from a common earlier creation myth. The idea of seperating the primeval waters, making clay out of men etc. seems fairly universal.As an aside, if the writers did not mean the sky was solid, how do you fit windows to it? (Gen 7-11. Everyday convenience for creators on the go.)Edit: I did mean to say making men out of clay, but I think I prefer my version.This message has been edited by Dead Parrot, 04-20-2005 03:47 AM

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Interesting commentary - where's it from?
They've got a few bits backwards: Applying electricy to water will break it up into the hydrogen and oxygen, not vice versa. Only if we skipped fourth grade. Alternativley, we could attribute it to (in plain english) the noise of the thunder knocking the drops of vapour together.This sounds like a version of the vapour canopy idea, which renders the pre-flood Earth looking a lot like venus does now - huge pressures and temperatures. Nice to see someone's still trying to make it work.I'd stick to the people who use "G-d", if I were you.

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Yes, that's what they said. It's still backwards. Do they say how much? Oxygen is toxic at high levels (above 25%, I think, for humans: ) The air is currently 20%, so there's not much room to play with, and I'm not sure how much I'd want floating around at ground level. And the hydrogen would be on top: Off into space in fact, which is why there is almost none in our atmosphere ( 0.0005%) although if the Earth was freshly made with a load of hydrogen in the atmosphere only a few thousand years previously, I'll accept that it wouldn't have time to do so.I doubt we'd need fire suppressant in the air, the hydrogen would be watered (ahem) down by the nitrogen.A quick scratching out:
We could add 5% of the mass of the atmosphere in oxygen before we die:5% of Earths atmosphere = 2.5x10e17 kgWe can ignore the hydrogen, it's too light to make much difference, so we get the same(ish) mass of water if it's converted to water.Mass of the oceans = 1.4x10e24 kg, so we'd only get
0.000001% of the current oceans from this method.But I guess it's a start.This message has been edited by Dead Parrot, 04-20-2005 10:09 PM

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Some sort of waders might be in order...

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Off topic, but the idea of rapid continental shift is interesting enough to come up with more idle scratchings...Lets say the continents moved while the earth was flooded (150 days) and restrict ourself to north and south America:Area of plates = 119,505,000 km2
Average thickness around 150 km,
so about 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 m3 of (mostly) granite
density of granite is around 2,600 kg/m3, so
46,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg of rockTo cover 5,000,000 metres (the approx distance) in 150 days, requires acceleration/deceleration of 0.77 metres per second per second:The power required is therefore 36.1 zettawattsI had to look up zettawatt. It's the amount of energy you get from a small star, and I wouldn't fancy being near 36 of them in a boat...

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Reminds me of "Dogma":
"I am the Metatron... Don't tell me the name doesn't ring a bell. You people, If there isn't a movie about it, it's not worth knowing, right?"

Be happy to! I'm going by a USGS factsheet , which says:
"Plate thickness also varies greatly, ranging from less than 15 km for young oceanic lithosphere to about 200 km or more for ancient continental lithosphere (for example, the interior parts of North and South America)."
I thought 150km was being quite generous. Thats the width of the Atlantic, from Africa to S. America - The distance the plates have moved. Fair enough, but that's how far they've moved. We would then have to explain how the ocean got to be over 3,100 miles wide in the subsequent centuries without anyone notice a continent scuttling off over the horizon. (The movement at present has been meaused at about inch per year.)I didn't add any friction into my sums. The figure I was working out was how much energy you'd have to put into the plates to get them moving that quickly. The energy has been building up (as stress in the rock) for years, so it's not generating heat per se. Counting on my fingers, the 2004 tsunami was about 0.00000001% of the amount of energy I've guesstimated. You seriously wouldn't want to be on the same planet. The ring of fire is very active - always has been. Earthquakes are a daily occurance here (New Zealand) but we're lucky enough to get lots of little ones, rather than occasional big ones. (Having said that, I haven't felt one for over a week now...) Now that the plates have rearranged, it'll be a couple of years till it settles down again You're not kidding...

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Consider that nit well and truly picked...

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Ahh, an evil conspiricy of athesist cartographers? Could be... Although I flew over it last year, and certainly looked big. So, move just 20,000,000,000, trillion tons of rock, that have been floating like a cork up till then? Try an experiment:
1)go to the beach
2)throw a rock in the ocean
3)time how long it floats. If it's more than a thousand years, I'll accept it as a possible. The heat in the earth is from radioactive decay - it drives tectonic activity, not vice versa.

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

(Deep breath)
I was talking about the amount of energy you would need to put into something the size of a large tectonic plate to make it move any any noticable speed.As an aside, why would a supreme being but a continent on legs? Although, after the platypus, I'm prepared to admit He may have sampled some of his finer mushrooms.

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

Well I was trying to keep things simple. But we've now got onto continents on legs. I wish I'd listened to my mother more often...

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.