Source of biblical flood water?

so i will.

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Gen 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

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i'll get the fountains in a sec. first, the windows in heaven. what's heaven?

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Gen 1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven.

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firmament. funny word. a literal translation renders something to extent of "expanse" (ala the jps version). but "firmament" correctly connotates the sense of hardness, a beaten and strong quality (the root of the word).what does this firmament do?

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Gen 1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

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Gen 1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.

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it divides the water above from the water below.it's a giant half-spherical vault that is the top of the sky. the heavens. heaven. it makes a pocket of air in which we live. it keeps the water above away from the water below. it is the first essential act of creation. if god were to undo his work, he'd simply let the two expanses of water touch again. (a "flood")this is exactly what happens in the genesis 6 and 7. god is unmaking his creation. he opens or creates windows in the sky, and the water that's above pour in. he also unplugs the whatever is stopping the waters below. he's bringing the two waters that were first divided in creation back together.

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Gen 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

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furthermore, these waters were always here, before the earth. some have suggested that god isn't technically responsible for the creation of land either, but i don't think that's right. (his "let the..." etc command is the same as for the animals) well, for one, nasa would have to be a hoax. as well as magellan. the explorer, not the spacecraft. basically, it makes the earth flat, like an inside-out snowdome. a solid arch keeping the water that's just outside our atmosphere from coming in. we would not be able to get outside of our atmosphere. (want to know why the tower of babel was threatening to god?)this, btw, is the literal reading. that's just what the text says. and this is the traditional hebrew reading. making up something about sub-crust layers of water and vapor canopies ignores the fundamental basis for creation, the great deep of genesis 1:2. a creationist ought not to subscribe to these things and claim to be for a literal interpretation of the bible. they neither jive with modern science nor scripture.and scripture does not fit very well with reality.

the sun does actually have SOMETHING to do with it, but not how that link described.when the moon is directly between the earth and the sun, the high tides are higher. when the earth is between the sun and the moon, the high tides are lower. when the two are at right angles, the high and low tides are a little closer together.these effects are not usually very big, depending on where you live.

but the tower builder were NOT selfish. they worked as a whole, together. maybe god doesn't know if he can get it right twice. i mean, he does change the ten commandments the second time around... but you are right though. it doesn't strictly make any sense. can't god kill anyone he wants to anyways?i think it has to do more with the symbolic nature of un-making creation, and borrowing a babylonian story. there was a thread for that, called "if genesis is metaphorical, what's the metaphor?"there are not literal meanings and truths you can get out of the story. but i'm not sure that's what the authors meant to do.

i'm a biblical literalist. i think the bible means exactly what it says, and i explained the literal reading of where the water came from -- AND by implication, where it went after the flood. i also think the bible is wrong, and provably wrong when actually read literally. literalists do not seem to read the bible literally.

i read the bible literally. i'm not making interpretations or pointing to metaphors or hidden meanings. i'm just describing what the bible actually says. if the literalists don't agree with me, well, they're not reading it literally. see my explanation in this thread. did i do anything secretive? did i appeal to any sort of personal opinion, save that i think it's wrong? no. i just explained what the text says, using, of all things, the text.

no. i'm not doing that at all. the people who talk about vapor canopies and sub-crust oceans do that. i'm not trying to fit the bible into any kind of modern understanding at all. i'm trying to understand what the people who wrote it meant, and how it was read back then.heck, i described a flat earth, with a giant glass dome, surrounded by water in every direction. i said this glass dome keeps the water out, and that universe is not only geocentric, but limited to the earth and this dome. how, exactly, is this a scientific understanding?in fact, i'm fairly certain that science has proven 100% of that to be innacurate, but that's not my fault, i'm just reporting what the scripture says. it's the people who try to get them to line up -- and are forced to compromise BOTH -- who are using modern scientific understanding.

well, my point is also designed to combat those people. you see, they do NOT actually believe it happened the way the bible says it did. they like to pretend they do, sure. but they don't.who in their right mind would defend this glass dome in the sky bs? and yet that's where the bible says the water came from. that, and great well beneath the ground. to try to read something else into the bible is simply idiotic. this is what it says.but hey, i'll give this argument to the first fundy that actually argues that the earth is flat, there's a big glass done over it, and everything else is water. if they wanna think science is completely wrong, and that the bible is the ultimate truth, they should at least do it whole-heartedly. not this half-assed bastardization of both. to further argue this devil's advocate (or rather bible's advocate) position... i do believe god qualifies as "supernatural" as opposed to "in nature." so what's wrong with thinking the flood came from outside the natural universe? i mean, it was a miracle, right?

well, it's not nothing. it's water. and it's always been there -- god didn't create it, according to the text. god just created the heaven and the earth inside it. we should also agree that it's just sometimes wrong.in this instance, to remove the themes of dome of heaven and primordial ocean is to rob the story of its meaning. you cannot divorce the story for this, and pretend that a natural flood just kind of happened in a completely impossible way. and *maybe* god did it.no, it's clear the authors didn't understand the universe the way we do today. it's also clear that they borrowed a plot to apply their themes too. this is a common story. maybe they're all really based on a real, localized flood. maybe not. but the issue isn't whether or not this actually happened, but the promise at the end of the story.the point of biblical stories is often found at the end. "...and this is why..." etc. in this case, god promises never to destroy all of humanity again. even if he never really did in the first place. the authors of genesis seem more concerned with the importance and meaning and traditions of the stories than their literal truths.cause, let's face it. the bible is wrong about that flat earth and glass dome in the sky. there may be some metaphysical and metaphorical truths to the story, but the literal reading really has very little to do with reality.

the bible says there's a hard object, shaped like a dome, that keeps the water above the sky out. this object is called "heaven"that's what the bible says. do you believe it, or not?

like i said, i will give this debate to the first creationist who has the balls to say they honestly believe the world is flat, with a big glass dome overhead that keeps out the water, just like the bible says. that is what the bible says. only the universe here is very, very small. it's a circle of "earth" and a half-sphere of "heaven" which contains the stars and the planets and the sun and moon. and outside of that is water. granted, it does not say how THICK the heavens are, but the indication is that when you open a hole in them, water comes out. but that's not what the bible says. the bible says the firmament that separates water is HEAVEN. in the sky. not EARTH, in ground. a thin layer of water, other than being physically and logically impossible, is not the same as solid object that keeps water out. one is suspended by magic, and one is the structure doing the suspending. no, not really. the bible is pretty clear on what it means. it says there's a solid object called heaven that separates the waters above from the waters below, and under this is the earth. it's not a matter of interpretation. it's what it literally says.people who propose other ideas such was walt brown and his vapor canopy or subcrustal ocean ideas are perverting both science and the bible. it doesn't fit with either. they do this to justify the bible as a legitimate scientific record, validating their belief. the bible is simply not a science book. its view of the universe is not accurate.you either have enough faith where that doesn't matter to you, or enough faith that you really think it's accurate. depends on where you place that faith, i suppose. but to try to justify your faith with misreadings and misinterpretations matched with poor science and geology and physics... well.seems kind of like he's got something to prove to himself, right?

sure. for one, the egyptians did. if these object we were talking in the hebrew mythology were GODS, it might look a little like this: nope, seems to fit with the themes of the hebrew bible. for one, there's several important themes about god conquering leviathan, who is the chaotic water serpent -- the embodiment of these waters.and this is found in other places in the bible too. where do you think we got the flat circle bit?

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Isa 40:22 [It is] he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof [are] as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

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and the glass bit?

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Job 37:18 Hast thou with him spread out the sky, [which is] strong, [and] as a molten looking glass?

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sure they did. how would they have known any better? they didn't have astronauts. they didn't even especially tall towers. heck, i've been offices taller that babel. this was a common perception of the universe at the time of the origin of the stories. (although it may have been outdated at the point of authorship) you mean creation ex-nihilo? that is more or less what the bible says.

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Gen 1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

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god's not doing it. he's not even commanding it. he's letting it happen. and yet it is continually supported throughout the rest of the bible. remember, many of us here CHECK our translations. and look at other translations. this is not an absurd interpretation. it's what the bible actually says.saying any different -- THAT'S the interpretive part. and if it's absurd... well. i'm sorry. then the bible's absurd and you just have to accept that fact. we're just reporting what it says. if you don't believe it that's not my problem. really? i've heard everything from 6 to 10 thousand years. depending on how you count. see, the bible never explicitly SAYS how old the earth is.so do we go by the jewish count? they're actually just shy of 6000, at 5765 (2005). do we go by a known date like the exhile to babylon circa 600 bc? do we go by the genealogies of jesus, assuming his birth at 0? and if so, which one? and we're counting by those, do we count the generations they skip, that are included in chronicles?see, it's not exactly cut and dry here, is it? hey, you're the one with a chimp in a suit for their icon.

look up some egyptian mythology and get back to me.

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Psa 74:13 Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.
Psa 74:14 Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, [and] gavest him [to be] meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.

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see that first bit? dividing the sea? now refer back to genesis 1.

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Isa 27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.

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Gen 1:21 And God created great serpents, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

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you're probably used to this verse saying "whales" but it says tanniyn, or serpents. it's the same word for the thing that moses's staff becomes when he casts it to the ground. i don't think it became a whale.leviathan is probably one specific great tanniyn. he is also represented in ugaritic mythology has the seven headed water dragon whom el (as in elowah, elohym, or el shaddai) the wind god slays. i know what i'm talking about. however, you do not. one, there is no such thing as an aquatic dinosaur. marine reptiles, yes, but dinosaurs are NOT reptiles, and only live on the land. (ask your local paleontologist if you don't believe me. i've only had a mild interest in it my entire life)and leviathan cannot fit the description of any earthly animal, let alone a dinosaur. for starters, he has seven heads (the inspiration for the great red dragon of revelation) and breaths fire. real animals just do not have those properties. draw one on a piece paper and see. with god. presumably on the earth, btw. but it's no matter, one of the verses above states that god sits on top of heavens in his throne. into heaven. the firmament. for the life of me, i don't know what you mean. there's a verse in matthew that says "one end of heaven to the other." how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? that's great, but that's not what genesis says, is it? haven't read the bible much, have we? i suggest you actually take some time and read it. it's an interest set of books. i would not call 4000 years difference a "narrow range" when we're only dealing with at most 10,000 years. that's 40% margin of error!and feel free to point out WHERE it says when adam lived? got a date? i can't find one. we're not dealing with 245 years here. we're dealing with a little more that 4000 years difference. which is it? why do some creationists assert 10k when some say only 6? and when the jews say 5 and 3/4?don't forget, i'm dealing with what the bible actually says. not stuff people made up about it. not the arithmetic of later scholars. the bible says there is a glass dome over teh sky that keeps out the water. the bible does not say the earth is 6000 years old. the bible, for all intents and purposes, starts with a universe of infinite age. it's not a few centuries. it's FOUR THOUSAND YEARS. in the scope of only SIX thousand years, that 2/3rd over, isn't it? that's a HUGE difference.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 04-18-2005 04:21 AM

it *IS* something ridiculous like i say. i am not assigning the ridiculous quality. i'm just reporting what the bible says. if you think it's silly, that's you're problem. i happen to think it's a very useful and interesting set of book and i rather enjoy studying it. it's not an interpretation, nor is it an attempt. if it's silly, unflattering, negative, and base, it's not my fault. i'm just reporting what the book says. it says there's a solid object that divides the water above from the water below, and that this object is called "heaven." we live under this object. you're not debating me, you're debating genesis.if you don't agree with it, i suggest you change your position on the bible. trust me, walt brown has been torn to shreds several times over on this board. the amount of water it would take to flood the planet being contained in the ground would saturate the rock so much that there would be no such thing as solid ground.and remember -- this water has to go somewhere when it's done. so this water has to still be here. and we don't have enough water on this planet to flood it all.walt brown is trying to justify some little bit of scripture with the real world because his belief, and the beliefs of others, depends on genesis being literally true. yet, he's willing to ignore that blatant statements in genesis that indicate the water came from the source of creation, above the heavens and below the earth: the great deep.i am NOT trying justify genesis with the real world. i'm just reporting what it says, so that you can see that this idea does not actually fit with reality. no, impossible in general. there'd be so much water in the atmosphere we'd all drown. unless adam and eve had gills, this would be a problem. but then -- that'd prove adaptation to environment: evolution. really? let's look. there's a couple of verses like this:

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Gen 1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

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where god puts the sun and the moon in the heaven. here's a suspicious one:

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Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

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but since we're talking about a vault, this isn't suprising.

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Gen 6:17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein [is] the breath of life, from under heaven; [and] every thing that [is] in the earth shall die.

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there's a couple under heavens.

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Gen 15:5 And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.

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and there's some stuff about the stars being in heaven. (even now, we treat the stars as if they were fixed to a solid sphere that cirles the earth for some purposes, because it's just easier. even if we know this is not the case)

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Gen 19:24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

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Gen 22:11 And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here [am] I.

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a few indications that god lives there. (el being a wind god, this is not suprising)

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Gen 28:12 And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

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where's the other end of the ladder? most of these suggest a solid roof. no, there are not. there's a few metaphorical readings, and there's a few creationists who say different things because they can't justify something so patently silly or outdated or just plain don't know any better. the only legitimate reading is that a solid object, a firmament, separates the waters above the earth from the waters below the earth. that's not an interpretation, it's what genesis actually says. i'm not playing funny translation games. i'm reading the text. you're welcome to read along. god separates the waters. does this by placing something inbetween them, vertically. this makes a vault shape of the sky. so outside our atmosphere should be water. uh, you're the one proposing magic here. that is what god is -- magic. you can't use "magic" to condemn people for believing in natural occurances when your explanation is supernatural. that's like the pot calling the china black. no, actually they don't. they fit for people who just don't know any better. i know a lot about science. i know alot about the bible. and they don't fit with EITHER. i routine debate creationists on this board based on both natural sciences AND theology. which is what i have done. i don't care about it lining up with the real world. i don't care about it lining up with ITSELF. i'm interested in what the bible says. it goes in reverse too. to justify science with theology is even sillier.

did you know that the egyptians historically had the first monotheistic religion? it was several hundred years before the earliest estimes of when moses would have been there, assuming moses even existed. it was under a guy named amenhotep iv, or akhenaten, take your pick.from the sounds of it, egpytian religion may have more of an effect on judaism than vice versa.including this "living god" bit. that's an egyptian phrase for "pharoah." just so you know. not dino-type thing. DRAGON. great serpents. with seven heads. and yes, that's probably what tanniyn in genesis 1 is referring to. no, let's.

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Rev 12:3 And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.

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Rev 12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

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Isa 27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.

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same language. revelation is drawing on the leviathan imagery, which draws on the story of lotan and el. and as already discussed, leviathan has seven heads according to that story. nessie. and plesiasaur. and no, leviathan is not one of those. although it *MAY* have been based on dinosaur bones, but i doubt it sence they then would have associated with land. this is a description of a mysterious monster that lives in the great deep, and wrecks ships, with lots of heads. a more likely animal would be a giant squid. eh, i looked up another translation. that verse seems to be talking about the "vault" as in the dome i was talking about. you asked where enoch walked. i said with god.

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Gen 5:24 And Enoch walked with God: and he [was] not; for God took him.

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he walked with god. then, he was not because god took him. so presumably, when he walked with god, he did it on earth. god being on earth is not a foriegn concept you know. have you even read the bible? he does it all throughout genesis and exodus. and yet, that's what the bible says. it's not my fault it doesn't make sense. want the verse?

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2Ki 2:11 And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, [there appeared] a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.

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elijah is in heaven. this heaven:

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Gen 1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.
Gen 1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

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and this heaven:

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Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

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heck, if he's there, we should be able to see him with BINOCULARS. and the hubble telescope should be UNDERWATER. yeah, but we are discussing the views in genesis, aren't we? they wanted to know where the flood came from. if we ignore genesis -- we ignore the flood. no really. the bible is an interesting book. you should actually read it sometime. it's also funny. tell me you got some of the jokes, right? thank you but i am not reading out of context at all. i'm reading not in context of the rest of the old testament, but the context of the society in general. perhaps you should do some research. the last bible class i was in really gave the fundies a hard time. because the teacher dealt strictly with what the bible said. and the literalists just couldn't accept that the bible didn't actually say what they thought it did.

then you haven't read genesis. it's right there in black and white in your own copy of the bible. i think you're the one missing something.

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Gen 1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.

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now try cramming 10 gallons of water into a pebble using a pressure cooker, and see what happens. actually, it would. ever hear of something called "the greenhouse effect?" but you're still ignoring the fundamental MEANING of the scripture. when god opens the windows of heaven, and unstops the fountains of the great deep, he is undoing that first step in creation, and bringing waters back together. you're missing the concept of undoing creation.it seems to me that to try to justify the story without any attention to the REASON or SYMBOLISM behind it is to completely invalidate the need to justify the text in the first place. heaven can mean the vault itself, or the space under the vault (the sky). i might concede that there is no solid object to hold it up, but that would be ignoring the job reference:

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Job 37:18 Hast thou with him spread out the sky, [which is] strong, [and] as a molten looking glass?

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which seems to indicate a solid object. as well as the fact that word for "firmament" implies something solid, and spread by the process of beating. however, even if nothing is there... the bible still says that there is water above the sky. nothing but water above the sky. walt brown is a hack. do a search for his name on this board. and yes, we DO know roughly what the bible is talking about, and it's an antiquated world view that does not fit modern science. if you want to reject science for genesis, the least you can do is actually do that wholeheartedly. no. not deep space. the sun, the moon, and stars are all in this firmament. this firmament is like a tent over the earth. the water is outside of it. this is not an interpretation. this is what the bible says. it's not that it's the only legitimate interpretation. it's basic reading comprehension. science is founded on something called methodological naturalism.religion is founded on the supernatural.it would be wise not to mix the two up. don't look at me. you're the one who apparently hasn't read the bible. i'd suggest that that would be a good place to start. we'll get darwin and dawkins later. tell me then, according to the bible, when did adam live? please provide the book, chapter, and verse?and science is NOT a "belief based faith." christianity is a "belief based faith." science is based on something called "evidence" where faith in christ is not. like i said, it would be wise not to mix the two up.