skeptic dave

This may have been covered already, sorry if it has.
The story of Noah is laughable at best but not to mention shares a common parallel with other stories of flood heroe's historically much older than Noah's.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is much older and many early societies share similarities with the Noah tale.
Common themes in deluge mythology are:
sending off bird(s) to look for dry land,
duty to build boat to save chosen masses from wrath of god,
flood is to exterminate the mass wickedness,
bring two of each animal,

I've heard of a recent discovery of an Egyptian flood story that is similar and it is suspected to be even older than Gilgamesh. It was written on clay but I don't have a clue to the proper name of the work. Any help with that or other flood tales would be appreciated.

ahappyheretic

This is not necessarily help, but I recently saw a Discovery thing about the Incas (people who lived in the Andes, I think), and that they had a flood myth somewhat similar to Noah's flood but their flood was supposed to have happened some 2 thousand years ago.

Bartender

I just saw on FoxNews the other day that some "researchers" think they may have found the ark on Mt. Ararat. Oh, the suspense.....

LoneWolf

/Devil's Advocate :devil3:

Well, if there actually WAS a world wide flood wouldn't one expect to see such stories throughout many cultures?

Biff the unclean

Was that other day April 1?

David B

We do see flood stories through many cultures. However, we would expect most cultures (not perhaps, the real desert ones) to have a thousand year flood every thousand years, and it's likely that such an event would go down into the folk tales and myths of that culture.

There's a flood myth in Amerindians in the Cascadia region that is quite recent. It can be dated exactly (to the hour) by a combination of tree ring analysis in the Pacific NW, and Japanese orphan tsunami records.

David B

Malachi151

My theory of flood mythology is that it has been influenced by fossils.

Sea shells are the most common fossils and pretty much every ancient culture came into contact with them.

There are many writings by the Greeks, Persians, and others from Mesopotamia about sea shells in the mountians, proving that the mountains had to have been covered by water at one point.

David B

Yup, that makes sense. Explanations are not necessarily 'either or'. They can be 'both and'.

David B

skeptic dave

not necessarily because according to "legend" all other people were wiped out.....................but i get your point. throughout history there have been many floods and those early civilizations were the "known" world.

Zeichman

I took a class which was pretty much comparative cosmogonies, and this is something which we spend some time on. If you want some recommended reading, I'd suggest the following:

Myths from Mesopotamia (or via: amazon.co.uk) - Revised Edition (Ed. Stephanie Dalley)
-This one has some indespensable primary sources, the most important being Atrahasis and Enuma Elish, which I believe the editor called "The Epic of Creation."

Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Bernard Batto)
-The author is a confessed Christian, which may be off-putting to some, but engages very well with the Documentary hypothesis and which near-Eastern cosmogonies most resemble each source. He devotes a chapter to the Exodus' "Red Sea event." His conclusion that the creation epics of the Biblical tradition undoubtedly were written to serve a non-historical purpose is a necessary antidote to the creationism which pervades some Christian thought. What he does say is that P and J's stories were written as polemic against either the Assyrian of the Babylonian stories which the respective author would have been all-too familiar with. I think all the non-Biblical cosmogonies examined are in the above work. This work is very accessible to someone unfamiliar with much of the scholarship in the area.

Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Richard Clifford)
-The name says most of what it's about. Each story is looked at on its own terms, and several chapters are devoted to Biblical creation traditions, such as Deutero-Isaiah, Wisdom Literature, etc. About half of the cosmogonies discussed in here are in the top work, and I cannot reccomend enough that one finds primary sources for these other stories. The level here is much more scholarly (being part of the Catholic Biblical Wuarterly Monograph Series, number 26, FYI), and would be best understood with at least some previous knowlege in the area.

The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Conrad Hyers)
-More accessible than Batto's work, also with a liberal-Christian goal in mind for this work. The conclusion is about the same as Batto's, in favor of an anti-literal interpretation of the Genesis cosmogonies. If you have creationist friends, buy this for them, or at least lend it to them.


All of these works, it should be said, presuppose some, but minimal familiarity with the documentary hypothesis.