Re: [asa] Noah's local flood? (a religious myth)

Bernie,

It's more like saying Santa is partly true because he was a real person who lived in Asia Minor and gave birth to the modern myth.

But to get to the point, I will both agree and disagree.  I don't deny that maybe the story was meant to be "myth" to teach theology.  But I think your argument to get to that conclusion is wrong because the wording is not as specific as you claim.  When it says all land life was wiped out except those on the ark, it means nobody outside the ark was able to survive the flood.  It is telling us how effective the flood was in delivering the promised judgement.  This could be true either as local or as global.  It's just not telling us what happened outside of the civilization where Noah lived. 

You don't need "modern science" to disprove the global flood.  When Moses redacted this account, coming from Egypt he might have been aware that Egyptian history is older than semitic history and contains no flood account.  (It's interesting to see how Herodotus was faced with the same situation in that Egyptian history was older than Greek history and thus disproves Greek myth about gods giving birth to Heracles, etc.)  It would be natural therefore for even Moses himself to conclude that it was a local mesopotamian event and not a global event.  He seems to have implied as much, since he describes the "father" of pastoral nomadism to have been a descendant of Cain in Genesis 4:20 (note that "live" is present tense, not past tense, and Moses is giving an "explanation" for the origins of pastoral nomads who were observable in his own day).  Moses clearly was not being careful to describe a global flood when he redacted the account.

Without any doubt the Flood story in Mesopotamian culture was equivalent to the Christmas story in modern culture (with Santa Clause and talking snowmen and even the true parts  -- the nativity story, too).  There was probably some original truth of a flood compounded with myth through the ages.  Considering how culturally important it was, it would have been negligent for Moses to address theological questions without re-interpreting the popular flood mythology.  It would be like inventing a New Age spiritualism without re-interpreting Jesus.  Nobody does it!  So Moses had perfect motive to address the flood myth with a re-interpretation.  In fact, it was incumbent upon him to do so.  If he had no real history of the Flood to replace the myth, then he would be morally required to provide an alternative myth to re-interpret the myth.

Also, stories were not often written down as far back as when the Flood occurred.  Cuneiform was used mostly for counting acres of land and sheep and bushels of grain.  Only later was it used for literature, and only about the time of the Exodus was phonetic language invented.  So there was little-to-no history handed down reliably to the Bible writer at the time of the Exodus.  When Moses wrote the Pentateuch, I'm sure he did have some kind of Mesopotamian sources that had originated in oral story telling and/or cuneiform tablets, which themselves hailed back to earlier oral story telling.  God could have directly inspired Moses so that the errors in these pre-biblical sources would have been corrected.  But my sense for scripture is that God uses ordinary paths of information except for the prophetic sections.  Therefore, I have to wonder like you, if the story was meant to be understood as literal history.  It is quite plausible, and acceptable for an inerrantist like me, to believe that Moses wrote it as myth and intended us to recognize that it is myth.

On the other hand, maybe it was literal.  Maybe God did give Moses inspiration to correct the errors in the Mesopotamian accounts that he received.  Maybe Moses intended for us to believe it was literal history.  I lean just slightly away from that, and I think Moses probably had a high view of the value of myth in theological teaching, and that he used myth to counteract myth because it was morally the right thing to do.  I don't think his original audience would have been confused about it, since they were much more used to hearing mythological stories than we are.  I think most of the world's myths started out as fun stories that someone invented, and which his audience knew to be an invention, and only later generations misinterpreted them as fact.  Did the first person to tell the story of Pandora's box really believe it was history the first time it came out of his mouth?  I don't think so!

I believe the Bible's account of the Flood represents a memory of a real event, which got mythologized by the Mesopotamian story-tellers long before Moses or even Abraham came along, and which God's people needed to address since it was so central to the culture that surrounded them.  The polytheistic message in the story needed some correction.  Maybe Abraham or his predecessors addressed it long before Moses did.  Maybe Abraham brought a modified Noah-version of the flood story with him when he left Ur. Maybe the Noah-version represents not only a memory of a real flood event, but also a memory of a counter-culture that redacted the Flood account while still in Mesopotamia.  Who knows?

I don't think it's so important to figure out how much of the story represents history and how much represents counter-cultural re-interpretation of the existing myths.  I hate to see bad arguments used, though, and so that's why I have pointed out that some of the arguements used on this list are bad.  I'll be happy to see the story proven as true, or to see that Moses used myth as part of his God-inspired method of writing an inerrant Bible to teach theology.  Either way, it's not a big deal to me.

God bless!

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 6:23 pm
Subject: RE: [asa] Noah's local flood? (a religious myth)

  The problem, Phil, is that in the flood account the wording is very specific.  It said all land-life was wiped-out except for those on the ark.  It is also specific about the length of the flood event- Noah being shut-in for over a year in the ark.  To go local would be to go against the literal details of the story.  But to go global would be to deny modern science.  The only thing left, for a believer, is to see it as a myth to teach theological truths.  That’s my view- and I say “myth” to be crystal clear that the option of any kind of actual flood (local or global) really is not reasonable.

  Some may argue “it is not a pure myth because some parts may be true, like a real Noah person.”  But I think that’s like saying part of the story of Santa is true because there are such things as real Christmas gifts.

…Bernie

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of philtill@aol.com
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 3:02 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Noah's local flood?

Hi Vernon,

the OT often uses language that sounds universal but wasn't meant to be literally universal by the original author.  Note this passage:

Gen.41:57,  And all the countries came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph, because the famine was severe in all the world.

Did the Mayans in Central America and the Incas in South America go to Egypt to buy grain?  How did they find out that Egypt had grain, all the way down in their kingdoms in Central and South America?  How did they get the news in time to travel across the ocean, buy grain, and bring enough shiploads back to America in time before the famine was over?  How about the Polynesians, the Australians, the Eskimos (who don't even eat bread), the Chinese?  Did any of these far away countries literally go to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph?  But it says "all the countries" and "all the world."  What it meant was "all the countries in the region" and "all the world [lands] around Egypt."  There are many examples like this in the OT.  If you do a comprehensive survey of the "universal-like" language in the OT, you'll never again believe that the type of language describing the flood was really meant to tell us that it was global.

If you are willing to accept that universal-sounding language isnt' always universal, then it is easy to see how Gen.9 is promising the availability of God's grace to all humans and yet was dealing with only a local flood and was using symbols (Noah as a Christ-figure, the ark being a picture of salvation).  If you are unwilling, you can parse the passage a hundred ways to "prove" a local flood is impossible and nobody will be able to convince you otherwise.  Thus, it has to be left as an exercise for the reader to work it out for himself.  :)

God bless!

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Jenkins <vernon.jenkins@virgin.net>
To: asa@calvin.edu; philtill@aol.com
Sent: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 2:01 am
Subject: Re: [asa] Noah's local flood?

Hi Phil,

Clearly, to believe the Mabbul to have been a _local_ flood is essential to evolutionary assumptions.  Hence the symbolic explanations you offer.  But how, then, do you suggest we read Gen 9: 9-17?  God's covenant was, and is, with _all_ flesh; local flooding, and death by flooding, are facts of life.  Can this covenant have any meaning unless Noah's flood was indeed _global_?

Vernon

----- Original Message -----

From: philtill@aol.com

To: asa@calvin.edu

Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 10:40 PM

Subject: Re: [asa] Noah's local flood?

1.  Why animals and birds?

"Noah" means "rest" in Hebrew, and he was the messiah-character who was promised to bring rest to God's people.  Noah didn't need to take any animals at all, much less birds, but they symbolized how God invites all peoples to be a part of his family.  The diversity of the animals implies God's inclusiveness in the offer of salvation.  Noah took _all_ the animals into God's salvation, the ark.  It was also intended to be ironic that the animals got on board but the people didn't.  This implies that the people _could_ have gotten on board if they were willing, and thus it justifies the flood by showing that the people were doomed by their own choice.  So I don't see any problem in taking the account literally that Noah took birds, etc., even though it was a local flood.  The actions were symbolic, not practical in any sense.

2.  Why build an ark instead of simply walk away from the region?

I think we fail to see how important that region of the world was.  It was the first and greatest civilization, so a flood there would be as symbolic as the terrorists had intended on September 11 at the World Trade Center.  God wouldn't have told Noah to simply walk away because His purpose was not merely to save Noah but to make a symbolic statement about the judgement of that glorious and abusive culture.

It was a really big deal when Abraham was told to leave southern Mesopotamia, the center of the world, and to move to a land that God hadn't even shown him, yet.  Civilization had developed there over a perod of some 5000 years, and Abraham left only about 4000 or 4500 years ago.  That puts Mesopotamia into perspective.  The brevity of the first 11 chapters in the Bible make it seem like a short period of time and hence unimportant.  But to the people who lived at the tail-end of that period, the sense of grandeur and the depth of time that they felt for their world was surely no different than what we feel for the depth of recorded history ever since.  Imagine how big a deal it would be if the Pope believed God told the Catholic church to leave Rome, or if the Jews believed God told them to abandon Jerusalem, or if the Muslims took the Ka'bah stone away from Mecca.  Flooding Sumer, or leaving it to go to Palestine, were both really, really big deals.

With that in mind, I think that when God told Noah that he would never send another flood, he was only talking about the center of the world, Mesopotamia.  Then, that promise was fulfilled when God sent Abraham away from its godlessness rather than flooding it again.  I think that the prophecy to never send another flood was intentionally looking forward to Abraham in order to explain why he left.  Rather than send another flood, God sent his godly man out of the region because He had promised not to flood it again.  So Abraham, who could be considered a second "Noah", did in fact simply walk away.  The first Noah stayed and demonstrated Christ's salvation symbolically.  It was the second Noah who simply walked.. 

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:35 pm
Subject: RE: [asa] Noah's local flood?

William Hamilton said:
“Or as Bernie said, why didn't he just tell Noah to walk out of the path of the flood (he had time -- all the time he and his sons were building the ark)“

And doesn’t it seem silly to load-up birds, which should be able to easily fly away?

As for flying over a lake and seeing endless water- I know that feeling.  I’ve seen Lake Erie (sp?) many times, and it looks like an ocean from the shore- and even when flying over it.  But I guess when it comes to a local flood hypothesis, there are lots of variations (which animals on board or not, short or long duration, wiping out all humans or not, etc.).

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists..calvin.edu] On Behalf Of William Hamilton
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 7:26 AM
To: philtill@aol.com
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Noah's local flood?

I like Phil's summary. The part about the ark being washed into the Persian Gulf and being blown eastward makes a lot of sense. One minor sticking point of course is that if God knew that the flood was going to be local, why did He have Noah load all the animals onboard the ark? Or as Bernie said, why didn't he just tell Noah to walk out of the path of the flood (he had time -- all the time he and his sons were building the ark)

-- 
William E (Bill) Hamilton Jr.
Rochester, MI/Austin, TX
248 821 8156
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