joelr
Well-Known Member
But there is a general dating to the Noah version of the flood myth. While other flood myths that follow the same story date back much farther. So we know it's just mythical stories that are adopted into each new culture.
The Catholic church even admits these stories are not literal? This is from the Catholic website.
"
The Catholic Church does not prohibit interpretations of Genesis 6-8 that include a worldwide flood, but neither does the Church require there to be a worldwide flood in all interpretations of these passages. Instead, Catholic theologians understand the first eleven chapters of Genesis contain, in the words of Pope Pius XII, “simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people” (Humani Generis, 38).
Modern readers may interpret passages in Genesis that describe water covering “the earth” as meaning that the entire planet was inundated. But a resident of ancient Mesopotamia may have understood the “the earth” to mean only “the land” or the region he knew. In fact, the Hebrew word for “earth” used in this passage, eretz, can also mean “land,” as in Genesis 41:57, where it says that “all the eretz came to Egypt to buy grain” when a famine struck the region. This doesn’t mean that everyone on the planet went to Egypt to buy grain, just those people who inhabited the region to which the author was referring.
The author of Genesis may have also used popular storytelling devices found in other flood narratives in order to show how the God of the Israelites was superior to pagan deities. For example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the gods are afraid of the flood and flee to higher ground, but in the Genesis story God is in complete control of the disaster and is unaffected by it.
The Epic of Gilgamesh seems to have been derived from an even older story called the Epic of Atrahasis. In this story, a pantheon of gods floods the earth because human beings had become too numerous and noisy. The author of the Genesis account may even have been purposefully subverting this anti-life attitude in his own narrative in which God commands that Adam and Eve “be fruitful and multiply.” God’s decision to send the flood in judgment of sin instead of as a population control measure would be a further subversion of this theme. Pope Pius XII acknowledged that:..."
It's a myth meant to convey a message:
"Just as the Creation story communicated spiritual truths about God and the significance of humanity through figurative language, the story of Noah’s flood in Genesis 6–8 (as well as the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11) uses similar language to communicate truths about God’s attitude toward sin and redemption. The fact that the author chose to model his stories after existing narratives and literary conventions does not disprove the message he was communicating: that it was the true God and not any of his pagan competitors who intervened to save the survivors of the flood that devastated the land."
A Catholic Perspective on a New Attraction
