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How would you describe what happened to Noah's people?
- Thread starter Remté
- Start date
Ellen Brown
Well-Known Member
God saw that the people were sinful and unrepentant, even after many warnings. Then he drowned them save for Noah and his family. He also saved two of every kind of animal.
Who did? The giraffes?
The story of Noah whether told in the Quran or the Torah as an allegorical story that describes the relationship between man, God and His own soul. It speaks of the consequences of either turning towards God or turning way from Him. Although based on an archtypal prophet, most of the story is mythical.
Tumah
Veteran Member
A local flood. The story grew over time and became a story about a worldwide flood. Stories do this.
The flood story is a myth.
It didn't. No global flood submerging all land forms ever occurred.
You might ask why the story was concocted. I have always believed that it derives from the discovery of marine fossils at the highest elevations. Suppose you found sea shells and similar fossils at an elevation of a few thousand feet. Wouldn't you try to account for that unexpected finding? How did they get there? People didn't drag them uphill and put them there.
Today, we understand that mountaintops were once sea floors that have been pushed upward by moving tectonic plates. But it would seem more likely in ancient days that the water rose over the mountains rather than that the mountains were raised out of the water. I suggest that this is why that particular flood is said to have covered the mountain tops.
And people have been trying to find some other hidden meaning to the story ever since, meaning which I contend was not intended by its authors. Trying to inject moral judgments about mankind into the story leaves one with problems. You're left with a story in which the creator of man blames His creation for its own design shortcomings like Ford blaming the cars for a recall rather than its engineers, a problem which he tries to rectify by indiscriminately killing almost all terrestrial life and repopulating the earth using the same breeding stock while hoping for a better outcome. That's not a very flattering portrait of a god.
The people? For what? Being people and doing what people do?
The other animals? Did they deserve what can only be described as a horrifying death as water levels rose and those animals that could sought progressively higher ground until one day, they could go no further, saw the water levels rising above their necks, craning for a few last breaths in sheer terror, and then dying. Does anybody or anything deserve that?
This is what I mean about the problem with trying to make the flood story into a morals lesson. The moral failing is in the god, not its creation.
Remté
Active Member
The Quran doesn't suggest that either.
Abrahamic mythology really isn't part of my tradition, so I can't say I've given it a critical read. Were I to interpret it wildly out of its proper context with polytheistic eyes, it would no doubt be a misinterpretation of the original intent of the story. Don't really have much to say about it, other than with a more Pagan and cyclical view of time, all things end to begin again; the Element of Water is the force of void-time and destructive unification that facilitates that process.
GoodbyeDave
Well-Known Member
A myth has been described as a story that is good to think with, or one that never happened but was always true. Mesopotamia was always subject to terrible floods when the rivers (particularly the Euphrates) burst their banks and changed course. When a town ends up under ten feet of mud, people tend to remember, and so the idea of a catastrophic flood became an obvious symbol for divine punishment.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
IMO, it's allegorical.
I believe what the Bible tells.
Reason was:
The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
Gen. 6:11
And the flood covered all former dry land:
The flood was forty days on the earth. The waters increased, and lifted up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth.
Gen. 7:17
Are you a disciple of Jesus?
Did they deserve it? I would say, evil people who are violent and make life suffering for all, don’t deserve to live. And unfortunately, world seems to go to that same direction nowadays and I believe the result will be similar.
sooda
Veteran Member
Long before Noah's flood the Gods of Sumer decided to drown mankind because they were too noisy.
sooda
Veteran Member
You ever been to Iraq?
This made me laugh.
How Long Did the Flood Last? | Noah's Ark: Beyond Flannelgraph
The Arkflood/how-long-did-the-flood-last
I believe when the flood ended Noah was 601 years and 6 days old, so the flood lasted one year. Somewhere around that time table. Of course, they calculated “time” differently back then, they actually counted backwards, in BCE … and then became Common or Christine Era counting time AD 1,2,3,4.
Reason is this:
The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth, and saw that it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.
Gen. 6:11-12
They didn’t deserve to live eternally. Eternal life is for righteous.
These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Mat. 25:46
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23
Flood as what Bible tells it was. Water that came from the “fountains of great deep” covered dry land. Here are few images that show the principle how it happened.
Are you a disciple of Jesus?
Wandering Monk
Well-Known Member
And the gods were tired of working and needed slave so that the gods could have a sabbath rest.
Wandering Monk
Well-Known Member
OMG! Are people really that stupid? 'And Jesus only read the King James Version of the Bible.'
sooda
Veteran Member
Periodically the Euphrates river basin would flood when spring snowmelt from the mountains combined with heavy spring rains. That's why it was a fertile area and that's what built the delta south of Basra, but it wasn't global.
There is a heavy flood footprint (sediment) about 150 miles wide and 350 miles south towards the Persian Gulf. The flood that inspired the mythology was circa 2900 BC. Noah was the king of a city state in Sumer who hauled grain, livestock and beer downriver on barges. The flood lasted 4 days.
Here's one of the myths it inspired.
Noah Of Sumer - Eden Saga - english