RE: Question for Dick (or anyone else)

Hi Jack, you wrote:
 
Call it the AIG model of the flood. ;) Of course in the AIG model all
people are descendants of Noah, since the global flood destroyed all of
the
Earth. And that after the tower of Babel all peoples were spread
throughout
the Earth. The flood stories in this model are all based on Noah, and
the
differences are from the tower of Babel incident. (I am not at all
proposing the AIG model as true, just that the idea that the flood
stories
might all be retellings of the same original event in the distant past.)
 
I wonder though if it possible to make a geneological "tree" and to
place
all of the stories in this tree and to hopefully find the root of the
tree.
The different "mutations" in the stories could be compared and stories
with
less differences would be more closely related, etc, just like it is
done
with DNA. Obviously I am not a linguist, but am curious if there is
such a
way to do this.
 
This comes from my book, The Origins Solution:
 
James Strickling tackled the problem of Noah's flood, and compiled
sixty-one legends of flooding catastrophes from all over the world, and
found interesting similarities as well as striking differences. A
favored family saved in a boat has a basis in mythology from various
parts of the world. A remnant population of an unspecified number,
using other means of survival, also has a basis in mythology. Through
statistical techniques, he concluded:
 
"Either catastrophic flooding of global or near-global dimensions
occurred more than once, or there were more survivors of the Great
Deluge than one crew, or both."
 
Strickling reasoned that a one-time universal event with a family of
eight as sole survivors was not feasible. If Noah's flood was a
universal event, there were numerous survivors in many locales; or
perhaps, flooding occurred many times during man's history, and
survivors used various means of escape, or both.
 
Taking the counter argument, John Warwick Montgomery observed:
 
"The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of
the world's history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the
minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their
children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that
their remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten
it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant
countries, and among the most barbarous tribes."
 
Montgomery included a schematic summary taken from Byron C. Nelson's
Deluge Story in Stone that plots out the existing mythological accounts
on a graph showing both similarities and discrepancies. Montgomery, who
had access to similar data as Strickling, reached the opposite
conclusion. He endorsed a universal, one-time only event with eight
survivors versus Strickling's conclusion that such could not have been
the case. So, what is amiss?
 
What about the flood stories that permeate the mythology of remote
populations? Interestingly, the differences more than offset the
similarities. Nelson's schematic of 41 flood myths shows that just nine
of them mention saving animals. However tempting it might be to
attribute all those ancient stories to a one-time global catastrophe to
conform to the traditional interpretation of the Genesis flood, a
literal reading of Genesis does not require it, and the unyielding
revelations of nature and history disavow it.
 
It should not surprise us that floods punctuate the distant past of many
present-day civilizations. A look at a map of the United States, paying
particular attention to its cities, shows that early European settlers
located their population centers usually on rivers or at river
junctions. Concerns for drinking water, bathing, washing clothes,
irrigation, and transportation overpowered concerns about flooding.
 
Why should primitive men think differently? It would have been only
natural for early tribes to camp along rivers, and to be swept away upon
occasion. Indeed, besides tribal warfare, what other kinds of
catastrophes could there have been in ancient days? It is to be
expected that survivors would be most vocal in recounting a devastating
flood to following generations. The Interpreter's Dictionary of the
Bible deflates the idea that flood stories from different parts of the
world might be related to the biblical account:
 
"At one time this widespread distribution of a flood tradition was
considered proof of the historicity of the biblical account, which with
some expected modification had spread throughout the world as people
migrated from their original homeland in the Near East. This notion has
necessarily been given up. We know, e.g., that numerous peoples have no
flood legends in their literature. Flood stories are almost entirely
lacking in Africa, occur only occasionally in Europe, and are absent in
many parts of Asia. They are widespread in America, Australia, and the
islands of the Pacific. In addition, many of the known flood legends
differ radically from the biblical story and stand independently of it
and of one another. Many do not know a world-wide flood at all, but
only a local inundation.... Often the heroes save themselves in boats
or by scaling mountains, without intervention by the gods. Further,
only a few of the flood stories give the wickedness of man as the cause
for the Flood.... The duration of the Flood, if given, varies from a
few days to many years. Facts of this kind disprove the claim that the
biblical account is the parent of all flood stories."
 
Also, we need to consider the impact early missionaries had on the
mythology of primitive peoples. The biblical account of the great
flood, related by missionaries, may have become interwoven with ancient
tribal stories to produce hybrid myths that would parallel the Genesis
narrative more closely. According to Gaster no flood story can be
traced in Sanskrit until after elements of the Aryan civilization began
to arrive in India. The Nestorian Christian missionary attempts in
China stand out as the source of the flood story among the Lolos people.
Gleason Archer admits:
 
"The list of descendants in the respective lines of Ham, Shem, and
Japheth as recorded in Genesis 10 does not permit any easy
identification with the remoter races who lived in the lower reaches of
Africa, Far East Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Particularly in the
case of Australia, with its peculiar fauna indicating a long period of
separation from the Eurasian continent, the difficulty of assigning
either the humans or the subhuman population with the passengers in the
ark has been felt to be acute."
 
In other words, the Bible is silent on any possible relationship between
the descendants of Noah and the Black Africans, or the Mongoloid race,
or the native Americans who descended from the Asiatics, or the
Aborigines who populated Australia, or even the blond-haired
Scandinavians, not to exclude any racial group. That squares exactly
with what we know about the antiquity of those races of peoples who were
far distant from the Mesopotamian valley by 5,000 years ago. From C. S.
Coon:
 
"Since the beginning of agriculture no new subspecies (of man) have
arisen; the principal changes that have taken place have been vast
increases in the numbers of some populations and decreases to the
threshold of extinction in others. All this points to one conclusion:
the living subspecies of man are ancient. The origins of races of
subspecific rank go back into geological antiquity, and at least one of
them is as old by definition, as our species."
 
Dick Fischer
~Dick Fischer~ Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org <http://www.genesisproclaimed.org/>
   
Received on Fri Mar 17 11:18:05 2006