demoninho

Hi Guys,

I just need a little help. In dutch the term for the biblical flood is "zondvloed" (pronounced: sontfloot or flood of sins as opposed to just the normal "vloed"). As most of you know god promissed in Gen. 9:11() never to use a flood (but in dutch: zondvloed) again to punish the earth.

So my question is the word for the flood in the bible different from a normal flood (as seems to be the question in dutch :s) or are they the same and did god lie?

Seraph

It is my understanding that God said he would not destroy the EATRTH with water again.

So this little water displacement in Asia would most definately not qualify as Gods using water to destroy the earth.

demoninho

If you destroy a part of a whole you still destroy the whole!

But anyway does someone know if the word for the flood used in the original texts is a special word or the same word is used for floods in general? I can imagine a desertdweller's vocabulary is not going to be as large on floods, and other water related stuff, as say dutch might be.

Chili

De zondvloed is when all sins are washed away and has nothing to do with water except that baptism is required to make us ark builders in preparation for this zondvloed that will wash ours sins away. "Zond" is from "zonde" or "sins" in English. This translation is kind of a dead give-away that the flood was not a historic event nor was it ever meant to be a historic event. So yes, the flood in the bible is different and has no connection with surviving a normal flood of real water.

God never lied but maybe the preacher did if he did not use Catholic water. This may be the reason why some people see the hand of God in this recent natural disaster that had nothing to do with God.

Lugubert

Sorry, Chili, the "sin" part is just a folk etymology. You won't find zondvloed until the 16th C, when it replaced the earlier sintvloed, from the Old High German sintvluot which means "great flood". (dr. j. de vries, etymologisch woordenboek)

In Swedish, we have synd (first attested in 1526) and syndaflod (1529) in the same way. Several Swedish sources confirm the above description. In at least our case, I guess there was a confusion because there were two new, rather similar words, and general superstition would have helped as well to read a new meaning into one of the borrowed words.

Rick Sumner

Am I the only one who finds it appalling that, in the midst of horrific tragedy, it seems that all some people can think about is how they can use this to combat Fundamentalism?

Regards,
Rick Sumner

demoninho

Well, you might be surprised how many fundy christians and muslims I have met on the net glorifying the awesome powers of their god.

Toto

I would hope you are the only one who puts this spin on it. There are other threads on this board concerned with fundraising for charities.

There are also threads on the reactions of fundamentalists who see God's hand punishing the Thai sex tourism industry or Swedish and American tourists. It is part of the mission of this website to counter this sort of thinking.

Tubby Lardmore

I know that there is active volcanism in the Mediterranean Sea. The Stromboli volcano which rises from the water there is almost continuously erupting. I wonder if some large volcanic event might have set off a tsunami in the Mediterranean that killed numerous people on the shores of Asia Minor, leading to the Biblical story of Noah. As the story was passed down the generations orally at first, it could have gotten changed from "giant wave" to "forty days of rain," since the younger generations hearing the story would have seen heavy rains but would not have experienced the huge wave of saltwater. Just a thought. Not likely, I suppose.

Chili

Well anders, that is very possible but I would still see a connection with "sintvloed" and the survival of this flood which is needed to reach the other side of life where only saints are found. We have "sint" as the common word for "saint."

As an aside, we have "voorgeborgte" as Limbo. Can you see how this connects with our Lymbic system as the place called Limbo?