Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

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The OT is 1000s of years of pre-Christian history that was mostly told by word of mouth, all captured on parchment 1000s of years after it happened. Then it was all selectively collected and copy edited into a single volume another 1300 years after the period of the old testament ended.

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.

> 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.

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.

Or evidence for it working as a mechanism in storytelling, ie a trope.

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.

Rivers are prone to flooding.

When you’re a farmer at the dawn of civilization and the river valley your entire village has lived in for centuries floods, it’s like the whole world has flooded. It’s a basic matter of perspective, it doesn’t require world-wide acts of magic to explain.

I'm not claiming it requires worldwide acts of magic to explain. I'm saying that worldwide stories are evidence for a worldwide floor, not evidence against it.

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.

I am guessing “flood” got autocorrected in each place…. Well I’m arguing the opposite: that the multiple flood myths across civilizations simply means that floods happened a lot.

The ages of the patriarchs are almost certainly some sort of Hebraic numerology that has been lost to history and may have been influenced by different traditions (the ages in the Septuagint differ, for example). After all, the fact the majority of them are divisible by 5 is an interesting data point (compared to the lengths of rulership of kings, much later, which appear randomly distributed).

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...

Isn't the most likely candidate for the Great Flood the Black Sea being flooded? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

Basically: yes.

Also: Even today people cannot hear of a major catastropic event without immediately inventing stories with dark forces or sinnful people involved etc.

Why would it have been different back in the day? Many people suck at accepting that bad things happen without cosmic reason.

I like the theory that The Great Flood(s) were related to the Ice Age glaciers melting away.

Look up a graph of rising sea levels after the last glacial age. Writing starts precisely where the graph levels of to current levels.

After reading accounts of floods on the Mississippi before it was embanked and straightened. I'd totally believe that sort of stuff happened on the Tigris and Euphrates's rivers back 5000 years ago when it was wetter.

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

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