Okay, so this thread was comparing the myth in Genesis to the evidence we have left in the earth and it probably surprised some people with how much evidence we still have. The myth gets pretty accurate by the time we get to Noah, it lays out all the tribes of the earth, and those tribes were for real, if you ask me, those tribes were the real "foundation of the earth" (quoting St Paul) ... not Adam.
Hellenistic Greek and Olde Englishe were both much more fluid than their modern counterparts. People forget also, that the Bible is a collection of ancient writings, written by many different people over a long time; many centuries. Our modern mechanical minds forget to adjust to what we are reading.
If someone was telling a story and they spoke like this...
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 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.
... you would have no problem understanding that the earth that was without form - just water - was the earth that was created.
So that is how I read it.
I began this thread by posing the question, was this a do-over? Was this the latest time that God replenished the earth (after an extinction event)... but I think the answer is No, Genesis 1:1 is telling you the creation of the planet and the rest follows from it. That still leaves us with mankind living hundreds of millions of years upon the planet and mankind was created intelligent. Apparently, mankind has a way of surviving whatever the earth throws at him. We might not come out much more than cavemen, but we survive.
When we get down to Noah, the planet is really high tech. The flood story is still an 8000 year old myth by the time it is written down by Moses scribes... it appears they were working off of older texts. But Noah lived in a world where you could get dimensions for an Ark in a dream and easily build it, if you was rich enough. The myth might just as easily be an allegory for mankind surviving the floods... and it might be both; I think it is both because it reads like someone's actual experience.
The text places Noah just north of the Ararat mountain range. Assuming he was an industrious person, I'm betting he lived somewhere on the southern coast of the Black Sea. If we take "the fountains of the deep" apply that to the ice caps at the north and south poles, and look at what happened there when the Arctic ice cap was struck by a 700 mile diameter moon, there would definitely have been a tsunami and it would no doubt have drowned the city of Atlantis in a single day; think 100 feet of water or more. Did you know that the capstones on the pyramids had water marks at 100 feet?
But then, that tsunami would have mostly missed Noah, it would have cut south of him, he might have gotten 5-6 feet from it, it was no doubt day one for him. So God sealed him in his ark and now what? A couple of things... first, the Arctic ice cap was broken up by the meteor strike and no doubt a lot of water was on the move from the north pole... 2nd, the earth spin was nudged south, so the ice cap above Noah was now in the hotter southern latitudes and begins to melt from that also. So, for 40 days water keeps pouring in. Look at all the rivers in Eurasia and Europe... north to south... the Black Sea filled up and the water was moving south... so Noah's Ark kept rising until it passed over the foothills and then through mountain passes... that's exactly how the text reads!
Was Noah the only person with an ark on the southern coast of the Black Sea? I dunno. But there's one thing for sure... if you didn't build an ark, that was no place to be when the water came flooding in.
The saints that wrote the new testament didn't write Genesis... by their time, a jew had a very concrete understanding of Genesis, 2000 years of religion would have done that. That's why Winston is mocking me, he thinks I'm that kind of religious person. I'm just the opposite, I'm an iconoclast, I'm always forging forward... religious minded people tend to have a problem doing that. These posts are not composed in any way, these are my thoughts of the day, they build on earlier posts, and they keep moving forward, they are fluid, and they seek out new understanding, boldly going where no theorist went before, and the rest of the star trek theme, can't remember it.
