Sure, some events in the OT probably happened, but if I go by how much I exaggerate sometimes when telling a story, the Great Flood probably was just a dam that broke it's banks or something. Also doesn't help that every major culture that's old enough has a Great Flood in their history somewhere. It's almost like it's a TV trope of the ancient times.
Nothing in the OT can be ascribed to christianity alone. Things were much more... "fluid" then, and the concept of organised religion did not exist. Things happened, and people blamed the gods/demons/monsters/spirits/forefathers. Only after the fact were these stories appropriated by organised religion for whatever purpose or reason.
Folks living 100s of years: maybe they lived 100s of full moons, or seasons? Maybe the number was rounded up with every retelling to make the subject of the story appear more heroic? There is just no way that we can ever filter out the fact from the fiction in these old books I think.
I know you're trying to argue that this is evidence that humans are prone to pass on exaggerated stories about floods, but if there really was an ancient worldwide flood then we would expect most cultures to have a story about it. That is, without further details, the prevalence of such stories worldwide is evidence for an actual worldwide flood, not evidence against it.
It's only one of the many patterns that recur in prehistoric religion, and those aren't indicative of a physical constant either. Well, maybe the constant is our brains.
Consider: if there were few other stories of great flood around the world, we would take this as evidence against a worldwide floor. So if there are such stories, it's evidence for.
Lloyd Bailey wrote an interesting (non-peer reviewed) paper on the subject, "Biblical Math as Heilsgeschichte?"[1] and Ben Stanhope in "(Mis)Interpreting Genesis"[2] covers it as well.
[1] https://drmsh.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Bailey-Biblical...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mis-interpreting-Genesis-Creation-Mis...
Why would it have been different back in the day? Many people suck at accepting that bad things happen without cosmic reason.
We can make it to the road in a homemade boat
That's the only thing we got left that'll float
It's already over all the wheat and the oats
It goes something like, God selected a righteous person to help humanity survive the flood. He has this individual built a big ship in which humanity and animals can survive. The only difference in the story is that God took a form of small fish which grew larger as the flood date came close. In the end it became so big that it was able to steer the big ship during flood waves.
I love speculating on the origin of the flood myths. My personal favorites are long-lasting oral traditions about the Black Sea flood and the Persian Gulf flood, both of which were rapid, catastrophic large-scale floods of large areas that were previously settled by humans. Sadly, the true origin is probably a lot more banal -- the oldest surviving fragmentary literary evidence refers to the specific city that flooded, Shuruppak, or modern Tell Fara. There is indeed a significant flood layer there (60cm of alluvial sand!) at about the right time (2900BC), but this was left by a normal river avulsion that created a violent but local flood.
Some things just off the top of my head: Much of the story is probably a polemic (or has polemical qualities), it ties into the Genesis 6:4 Watcher theology (and much of the Second Temple period literature on the subject), and... the description of the ark has some translational issues that we rarely touch on. In particular, we have no idea what "gopherwood" is. Or if it's even a wood. Most probably it was thatching.
Note that the oldest attested Indic people lived to the west of the Iranian plateau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni
I forget count, but it was hundreds, every culture around the world has a flood myth.
Something happened, people speculate on melting ice, tidal waves, or something.
Stories are passed down for a long time, maybe this magnetic field switch had something to do with the stories..
There's no accident in my mind that in Revelation, the beast that rises up from the sea has 7 heads, because that's how Leviathan/Litanu was traditionally pictured in the Semitic cultures of the day (7 heads). Psalm 74 uses the plural for "heads" when speaking on Yahweh crushing them, though it never numbers them. Likely the imagery was a common cultural motif, so the numbering wasn't necessary for the readers to understand.
Leviathan likely represents a northwest Semitic chaos deity in opposition to Yahweh and is more or less the embodiment of evil that is destroyed in the eschaton, but this is probably speculative. I think there are strong arguments in favor of it, however.
Noah and Manu have the same characters and exact 'screenplay' in quite detail (only difference being the fish). Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region.
It is the only the story from vedic writings that matches from the Hebrew bible. Other than this story as far as I know all Hindu texts differ.
They can't have the same ancestors because one is of aryan lineage and the other is of semitic lineage.
It's more likely these cultures and peoples borrowed from the same story.
There's a lot of bonkers theology that rose to popular culture during that time period. Incidentally, it's also when Gog/Magog were ascribed to Russia (because of the Cold War), and if you read the papers by Dr. Paul Tanner on the subject, it becomes quite clear that the extent of exegesis performed basically amounts to cross-linguistic homophones—that is, that one of the regions (princes?) listed in Ezekiel, Rosh, happens to sound like the Indo-european root "Rus." Therefore, obviously, it's Russia... Facepalm.
I'm a Christian, and I lean more toward Dr. John Walton's view of Genesis 1, that it was intended as a functional description of the created order. We forget that the culture that produced the Bible was vastly different from our own, and the Israelites saw things as "uncreated" if they served no purpose. That is, the idea of nihility (or creation ex nihilo) are modern ideas that we have imposed on the text in order to satisfy a narrow reading of scripture. Even if you're not a believer, as one of my sibling comments suggests, the oral tradition itself seems to capture events from the end of the last period of glaciation.
But to assume people lived for 100s of years despite the fact we know almost nothing about the period during which the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) was authored (and we know little about how/when it was redacted, though most probably during the Exile) is naive. The ages most likely conveyed some meaning themselves, because the early Israelites were much less interested in exacting chronology than we are.
Here's an example: Sarah is said to have lived 127 years. Interestingly, 7 being the number of completeness/perfection in Israelite culture and 120 (or 110) representing the same in early Egyptian culture seems to convey the idea that she lived the "perfect" (or "complete") life as both an Egyptian and Israelite woman. This may be stretching the numerology somewhat, but if you step outside YEC material, there is some scholarship that makes a pretty strong case for this reading.