this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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The Ark (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 173 points 8 months ago (7 children)

In the Bibles defense, it didn't just rain:

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. Genesis 7:11

So, like, most of the water probably came from underground, not from the rain. Though I'd imagine both were pretty bad.

Not saying the story is true or anything. Just pointing out the straw man, since the Bible doesn't claim all the water was from rain.

[–] [email protected] 91 points 8 months ago (13 children)

If the Black Sea theory is correct, it wasn't even a global flood, but it would have seemed like the end of the world for anyone caught in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago

There's not much difference between a global flood and a flood of West Eurasia to the people living in West Eurasia, where the Bible was written.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

There's a number of places where Old Testament stories may actually be describing the stories of Bronze Age Libyans who end up relocated into the Southern Levant along with the sea peoples. Joseph with a colorful coat and an interpreter of dreams is sometimes likened to the Hyskos but compare the coat vs the depiction of the Libu. Not only are the Libu sporting blue in their coats, like the tekhelet later found in the OT, there's even the Tuareg Libyan people known for their blue dye and matriarchal lineage.

Around the time that tomb image is recorded there's even a papyrus talking about how the followers of Set have red hair and interpret dreams, and this is also the period when the Egyptian story "A Tale of Two Brothers" emerges with a number of similarities to the Joseph story.

This is interesting in light of the flood mythos because we now know that at the end of the ice age there was a migration down from Europe across the ice bridge to North Africa. This was around the time there really was coastal flooding including relatively rapid events which may have even persisted in local oral traditions.

Part of the issue with analysis of Biblical stories in terms of historicity (outside of the supernatural stuff) may be that we're analyzing a collection of stories that had been syncretized into a local tradition and later appropriated, much like the story of 'Israel' (Jacob) taking the birthright and blessing of Esau (the eponymous founder of Edom, meaning 'red') in the Bible.

In fact, according to the Dead Sea scroll fragment 4Q534 Noah had red hair.

So it need not even necessarily be that there was flooding in the Southern Levant for the flood mythos to be based on an oral tradition.

All that said, personally I'm rather persuaded by Idan Dershowitz's analysis that the Noah story was originally a story of drought and famine before syncretizing the Babylonian flood mythos into it later on and transforming it into a flood epic.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the link, very interesting read!

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago

Yes, it’s not only rain even as per Quran

“At length, behold! there came our Command, and the fountains of the earth gushed forth.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:40

and

“O Earth! swallow up your water, and O Sky! withhold your rain! and the water abated and the matter was ended. The Ark rested on Mount Judi.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:44

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Fair point! Its been a while since I heard this in my childhood, but I remember them explicitly telling us "it rained" without any other source.

Granted, we were children lol but if the artist had a Sunday school like mine then that likely is the basis for missing that bit 🙃

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Oh, i guess it all makes sense now........

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (15 children)

There are so many inconsistencies with this stuff, but what bothers me most is something else. The whole thing is just needlessly cruel to all living beings, many of which did nothing wrong. An omnipotent god could have done something way less cruel and way more efficient if it wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The Old Testament doesn’t do a lot to give the idea that god is “benevolent” or “kind”

Cruelty was kinda the schtick

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Anyone interested in this, I suggest listening to the "Data over dogma" podcast.

The Bible is a book with multiple authors that had completely different conceptions of God and that borrowed local traditions for their own.

For example, the belief in one god is believed by scholars to be a later change to the Bible. In that region, it would be more common for the belief to be that there's a God of a land or nation with their power bound to that land. The world was viewed as one with a battle of the gods rather than being one with a supreme ruler.

This is why the Bible so often disagrees with itself. Because each author had their own motives and were sometimes responding to each other in their writings.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

The extended universe is far too large and contradictory. Really we need Disney to just come in and buyout the whole Abraham franchise and just reset everything back down to a few core stories. And maybe forget about the Christmas special.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

Another take: God is an asshole and modeled men after himself. Explains a lot if you think about human history, doesn't it?

And of course there is no god, only delusions to keep the population under check. Humans are simply assholes by nature.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

We also don't talk about the fact that the only humans that were saved was a family. Who repopulated the earth.

Like, with Adam and Eve and their offspring, the implication is that they inbred because literally no other humans existed. Still pretty gross, but the second time it happened was just abject laziness on God's part. Like your omnipotent ass couldn't have at the very least picked a few more families.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I think I figured the math on the assumption that Noah's kids brought significant others with and it was technically possible to avoid parent-child pairings so long as each unrelated male female combination was utilized, which is to say they screwed each others wives in addition to their own. Not like the bible gives a fuck about parent child incest babies, that was Lot's whole character arc.

The animals, on the other hand, those are all shit out of luck.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Yeah and the kangaroos had to be yeeted back to Australia and were not allowed to stop anywhere on the way

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Slight disagreement. With Adam and Eve it is implied that there were other people about. Which is why Cain complains that if he is cast out someone will murder him. And why it isn't clear who the males are mating with.

The current understanding is that this was the origin story for those people and they thought pretty much every tribe around them had their own god with their own origin story. Later on retrocons left plot problems.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Right? Like people in the local area may have been terrible, but there were other people.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (3 children)

The ark story doesn't necessarily mean that all of sea level rise was result of rainfall.

Domino collapse of glaciers have been known to raise sea levels extremely quickly.

There was even a theory by a palentologist (which I cant currently find) of an ice dam left over from an ice age which separated two major parts of the ocean, which had different sea levels. When the ice dam eventually collapsed, the oceans would have reached equilibrium in a matter of days. Given the chaotic history of plate tectonics and ice ages, this isnt an unreasonable theory. Imagine if the mouth of the Mediterranean was frozen over, and the body evaporated down to lower levels, and people settled there. Then the ice wall collapsed.

Im not saying any of this explains a ridiculous bible story, just that, as a scientist, its short-sighted to assume rainfall was the only possible contributor to the flood.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

"The world" back then also was something like a town and its surrounding villages. It probably just rained really heavy for a few days, flooded some village in a way that never happened before and the only explanation was "God's wrath".

I believe most of religious stories can be explained by people talking shit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There was a flood after the meditteran salinity crysis, which happened partly due to lowered pressure in the nord causing the ground in the south to recede after the ice was gone (think of pressing in a balloon). There was a theory that the black sea flood (was half as big prior) due to this was what we know as the great flood, with humanity living mostly around there at the time, but i think it was refuted, because the flooding happened over generations there.

The thing with glacier seas happened mostly in scandinavia, gb, up there, creating the english channel (the heck? German it is Ärmelkanal).

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand why a wooden ark would melt like sugar under any circumstances.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago

It wouldn't. It would just break apart like if was hit with a huge mallet.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Fun fact: all of the oldest recorded stories - in addition to the Torah there's the Sumerian writings that are even older - have a story of a worldwide flood event.

The caveat being that to them, the "world" that was flooded was the Mesopotamian basin area. In the millennia since then, the known world has grown to encompass the entire planet, so the context informing our interpretation has shifted, and we need to expend proper effort to shift it back, to what they would have meant back then, not what it would mean to us today if similar words had been used, e.g. if the story were told in English.

The children's story myth seems to have arisen from an irl event, just not the one that the picture books repeatedly show & tell (obviously for reasons of profit, they sell what people will buy and enjoy looking at, rather than focusing on historical accuracy).

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Here's the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.

The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (25 children)

No we don't have to do that, not at all.

Floods happen, sometimes big floods happen, humans tend to live near water, so when big floods happen lots of humans die. The stories grow by being retold, eventually you get the mother of all floods stories.

I don't have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific. We have secular history and from there we can know what really happened. Now, the Bible is consistent on very little, homophobia is one of those things it is consistent on. The solution is not to be an apologist for the text. The solution is throw out that bronze age crap and be nice to the LGBT.

I did this crap when I was working my way out of religion and no one has to make the same mistakes I did. It wasn't really slavery, it wasn't really racism, it wasn't really genocide, it wasn't really homophobia, it wasn't really oppression...rip the band-aid off! It was slavery, it was racism, it was homophobia, it was brutal oppression.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

I kinda hate these types of comics. There really isn't any reason why this should be a comic other than the writer's medium of choice. The message gains nothing from the visual aspect. The comic could really have been improved if the author showed what the characters are talking about, but we just get a wall of text with a crudely drawn woman to represent the opposition. Also, the art has no appeal and is generally ugly.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Math checks out. ( 28800 ) 👍
Not sure I ever heard this angle before, but among all the impossibilities of Noah's ark, this is definitely a good one.

PS: in metric that would be approximately 10000 mm rain per hour.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

So what does "equivalent to a firehose" mean in this case? What area per firehose? A football stadium per firehose? An Olympic swimming pool? An average room? A jar?

EDIT: I think it's about one firehose per 10x10 meter area, so like a couple of rooms worth of area. It's not that bad. I bet rainfalls like that do happen for a few minutes in taiphoons and such.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

I assumed a firehose per area the size of a firehose edit: some quick googling says a 6cm firehose dumps about a cubic meter per minute, which works out to 500 meters of water per minute if we measured it like we measure rain.

30ft per hour is about ten meters per hour.

Yeah, no I would not say that is like a firehose.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Melted is the wrong word here, isn't it? More like filled up in minutes, sunk and become a watery grave for all the unfortunate souls within.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)

One morereason to like the fact France dont have any lesson on religion in its schools. (But let's be honest, there is also a aweful lot to dislike in our schools.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's illegal to teach religion in US schools unless it's specifically a class about religion. Which typically happens only in college

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Maybe it's because I'm in the deep south, but my high school had old testament & new testament classes when I attended.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's technically allowed as long as they are either extra curricular or electives

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