quote:
I'd like to discuss ancient flood legends worldwide...
Were I attempting to "prove" the worldwide flood, and did so through citing widespread flood legends, I would go to Ovid's Metamorphosis:
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Then he called
The winds and clouds, and bade them storm the earth
With floods of water; and the thing was done.
All landmarks slid beneath the rising waves;
There was no shoreline; all below was sea.
Some few surviving humans were in boats,
Riding above the roofs where once they dwelt,
Or fishing from the tree tops where the birds
Were displaced by strange creatures of the deep.
All but sea-creatures perished presently;
Some drowned; the rest died for the want of food.
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From all the human thousands, and these two
Were kindly folk, and lovers of the gods.
Thus seeing, he dispersed the sullen clouds,
And stopped the rains, so the fair sky once more
Was seen from earth. Then Neptune and his son,
The reedy Triton, sounded on their shells,
To rule the rampant sea, and bade it turn
Back to its ordered bed; and it obeyed,
From east to west. Again, there was a shore
To ocean, and the rivers knew their bounds.
From the subsiding waters, hills emerged.
Then after many days, there was firm soil
And growing trees, with leaves still marked by mud.
Earth was restored, but on it nothing moved
the entirety of Ovid's flood narrative can be read at:
THE FLOOD STORY FROM OVID
If I were to set aside all physical evidence for the purposes of discussion, and relied entirely upon the myths and stories passed down through various religions and traditions, I might come to the conclusion that a flood did actually happen.
Which makes sense from the point of view that floods are widespread, can be catastrophic, and through diffusion it makes sense that there would be some overlap in the stories coming from peoples related to each other and from societies that interacted or have some other form of relationship in a given region. Especially when you consider historical flood events that must have had tremendous impacts upon human populations (black sea, expansion of the mediterranean sea, flooding of populated areas in what is now the British channel, etc) and how these narratives might survive and evolve through the centuries in verbal traditions.
What I *don't* understand is how someone can default to the position that these stories are somehow corruptions of the biblical narrative, and not the other way around. Even if we were to accept a world wide flood (purely for the purposes of discussion -- I don't accept it for a moment), why wouldn't the Genesis account be rightfully regarded as a possible corruption of, say, the Etruscan / Latin / etc traditions? Of course this does not mention the likelihood of actual Mesopotamian roots for myth.
The only conclusion I can come to is that, believing the biblical account to be literally true, the defender of the position will warp and generate "evidence" to support their viewpoint while willfully ignoring anything which may lead to a contrary viewpoint. In my mind, those folks are more concerned with worshiping a work of man (the Bible) than any God which may exist.
We can learn a great deal about history through our myths; they can be windows to real events, and studying them can help us understand how our ancestors perceived and dealt with real world events. We use words like "semi-legendary" to describe figures who probably existed, but whose lives have been expanded beyond whatever was real. Noah, or whatever name you come up with, might well represent the real survivor (or survivors) of a catastrophic regional flood, but when you bend history (not to mention the sciences) to fit the brief narrative in a bronze age text, you lose credibility in my mind.
I suppose a valid point is this: even *if* tomorrow we all decided that there was a world wide flood, it would just as much prove the Latin mythos as the Judaeo Christian narrative. The literalist gains nothing from these arguments, and only makes themselves look ignorant, whether in history, geology, or literature.
Edited by Wollysaurus, : No reason given.