kctan

Am reading a book now & there is an interesting hypothesis in it which it says that Noah's flood is actually made up of 2 flood stories incoporated into one like the Genesis thingy only that Genesis can be seen easily as 2 different stories.

The 2 accounts are divided into Jehovistic (J) and Priestly (P).

P have alot of detailed references to calendar events and ages with the length of the flood rounded up from the lunar new year by 10 days to match exactly one solar year. The first dry land appeared on New Year's Day. While J have the flood lasting 40 days/nights followed by a 3 week wait for water to subside.

P uses 2 clean animals instead of J's seven & P also omitted the sacrificial of thanks performed by Noah after landing.

J has a pluvial or rain-driven flood & Noah have a week to wait in the ark before the flood came & then god sealed him inside the ark. P is a 1 day affair with water coming from sea & sky with Noah hurrying off on the same day.

J give no depth of the flood. P have a choice of 2 interpretations : ~5 metres above plains or ~5 metres above mountains.

At the end of the flood, P tells that as the water settled, the mountains reappeared & the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat. J have no mountains & Noah waited 3 weeks on a featureless sea before the land reappeared again. J also have Noah senting out the dove & raven to search for land.

God in J is mournful & regretted his act after realising that man is congenitally hopeless & evil. P have god with a positive high moral stance by laying down rules & such for man's new lifewith a grand & legalistic convenant with the most interesting part - the rainbow.

It seems that J & P are telling about 2 different floods with J's being a pluvial flood affecting alluvial & flat land while P is a catastrophic type which involves both land & sea.

P also seems to fit an estimate of the peak post-glacial overshoot of sea levels over the Arabian gulf coast of Mesopotamia 3500 years ago if we take the ~5 metres above plains flood.

End of comparison. What do you think ?

Source from : Eden in the East - The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia by Stephen Oppenheimer.

Amos

Not just the flood, but the entire bible can be read from two perspecives. In the end only the omniscient interpretation must hold water or it would not justify the means to the end. Having said this, especially in view of recent events, one one must wonder if literary censorship should not be introduced with regard to reading the bible.

Amos

[ September 30, 2001: Message edited by: Amos ]

kctan

The Jehovistic account is older than the Priestly account.

Both these accounts are much, much older than the formation of xianity the cult. If the author & those that examined the flood stories are correct, the P account would have happened somewhere 3500 years ago in which xianity is not even heard of.

So there is no link between these stories & what you are proposing. They are considered as folklores which have a more likely case of being real than the Genesis stories which inturn could also be flood myths themselves.

Marduk

The flood account in The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumeria) is much older than the Hebrew version and is thought to be the original story of a flood in 7000 BC when the Mediterania Sea flowed into what is now the Black Sea (Noah's Flood- the History Channel/ The Black Sea Project-National Geographic) There is archaeological evidense of new peoples moving to the middle east in this time period, bringing their pottery and flood story, the Ubaids, who pre date the Sumerians.

Bill

I still think that the best interpretation of the flood myths is the one by Ryan and Pitman wherein they identify the actual flood as being when the Black Sea was flooded about 7,500 years ago. This led to (among other things) The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is generally believed to be the original source of the flood story in the Holy Bible.

Since Gilgamesh doesn't contain this dichotomy, in order for your J and P interpretation to be correct, we would have had two separate translations (into Hebrew, presumably) of the identical source material (in Babylonian cuniform). This would not be an unusual occurrance, though (witness the discrepancies between the four Gospels themselves).

== Bill

kctan

The Gilgamesh Epic & Noah's flood could be the same one but both maybe carried as oral traditions by 2 separate groups of people resulting in the difference.

Same flood but 2 different views.

The archeological evident seems to point to a movement from the far East which got drowned during the flood of 7500 yrs ago.

The Ubaids could have been co-existing along with the Sumerians. Sumerians as the migrants from the East with the Ubaids as the originals living in the middle east region.

Some brachycephalic (broad headed) are noted among the people who first appeared in the Uruk period & were attributed to the Sumerians. Brachycephalic is a distinct feature of people from the far east.

If we looked into the legends of the Babylonians, they have one in which 7 sages were brought from the East & imparted to them all their technical skills & knowledge. This would mean that Noah's flood & all the Genesis thingy will be actually traditions brought from the East instead of originating from the ancient Semitics.

Apikorus

The flood story from tablet XI of the Gilgamesh epic itself has an interesting transmission history, beginning with 3rd millenium Sumerian flood legends, fragments of which are extant, to the familiar neo-Assyrian version from Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh. The neo-Assyrian version itself probably comes from a late version of the Atrahasis epic, as once the author slips and writes Atrahasis for Utnapishtim. The definitive study on the transmission history of Gilgamesh is that by Jeffrey Tigay. Interestingly, as Tigay points out, about a century ago the Assyriologist Morris Jastrow, based on what was then the sole extant version from Nineveh (i.e. before the Sumerian and old and middle Babylonian fragments were discovered) inferred quite a bit about the redaction history of Gilgamesh, most of which later proved to be correct. Jastrow employed some rather standard, if basic tools of text criticism, and his vindication through subsequent archaeological discoveries is an important validation of such techniques. An excellent summary of the history of the Gilgamesh epic is to be found in Tigay's excellent book, "Empirical Models of Biblical Criticism". (Too bad it is out of print!)

The Priestly strand (P) in the Pentateuch is largely postexilic (i.e. later than 586 BCE), so it is rather unthinkable that P was reporting any actual event. The J author, most scholars would agree, is to be dated to the 9th or 8th c. BCE, which is about a century or two earlier than Ashurbanipal. However, Gilgamesh is of course vastly older than the neo-Assyrian period, and the version from Ashurbanipal's library was probably largely unchanged since the mid-2nd millenium BCE.

What is peculiar about the Biblical flood story is that it is jarringly conflate. Both J and P are forced together in such as way as to render their fusion incoherent. There are many doublets in the Pentateuch - stories told twice, with different authorial voices. What is strange about the flood is that the redactor merged J and P.

A nice discussion of the biblical flood story may be found in Richard Friedman's "Who Wrote the Bible?"

[ October 01, 2001: Message edited by: Apikorus ]