OT. Pint Size Ark

Am 10.06.21 um 23:01 schrieb Dean Hoffman:

That is not a replica. The ark was round.

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Irving Finkel from the British Museum is a great story teller.

Gerhard

Nah, read the book.

Genesis 6:15 This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits.

A cubit is the distance from a man's elbow to the tip of his middle finger, about 18 inches or so.

I worked it out one time, and iirc a ship of that size would displace about 10,000 tons. Not a bad effort.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

... only that the cuneiform originals are quite a lot older.

cheers, Gerhard

Probably a bit more difficult to build a ship out of clay tablets, at least at a guess. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

They are perfectly fine for recording flood myths.

Genesis 6:15 is fairly obviously derived from the much older Epic of Gilgamesh. Fundamentalist do seem to think that god intervened to make sure that the King James Bible got everything absolutely right. Others beg to differ.

That is not a replica. The ark was round.

All the local civilisations have a variant of a legend of a great flood. That raises the questions as to what might have caused it.

One of the more interesting hypotheses is that the Mediterranean broke through at the Strait of Istanbul, forming the Black Sea. Naturally there are reasons that might or might not have occurred.

fredag den 11. juni 2021 kl. 02.30.03 UTC+2 skrev Gerhard Hoffmann:

and by round you mean fictional ;)

John Doe didn't like that observation. Being the twit that he is, he didn't bother to say why. One has to assume that he is a fundamental top-posting troll, which fits with his other idiocies.

Probably thinking of Noah's Arc :)

Am 11.06.21 um 10:30 schrieb Lasse Langwadt Christensen:

Fictional anyway. There is probably a law of conversation of the total amount of water on this planet. You cannot have it raise everywhere over the mountains at the same time unless you are talented in a very special way and are in very bad mood. :-)

At least they built an ark for the movie with bronze time tools and it floated, after the recipe & measures from the cuneiform tablet. And the tradition to build round boats in Irak has survived until the days of photography.

There are some other problems like the meagre gene pool to reconstruct the species; and when we accept the fact that the animals came

2 by 2, Noah's burnt offering after the event killed some species. Thought-out not so well, but could explain the missing dinosaurs.

OTOH, there is also a version in the bible where Noah took some more of the kosher animals with him; at most one version can be true.

But then, a system is either incomplete or has contradictions, as Gödel has shown.

Cheers, Gerhard

The conflation of history with mere reportage is an 18th-century invention. That idea didn't exist in the ancient world.

There are flood stories in every ancient civilization, not just Semitic and Indo-European ones, but also in Japan and Mesoamerica, which developed independently as far as we can tell.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Did they all occur simultaneously?

The Mesoamericans and Japanese had a flood legend too. Probably wasn't on account of the Black Sea.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dunno. I also don't know what you'd see if you had a Tardis and went back to take a look. What the scriptural author wrote about doesn't have much to do with geophysics.

It's obviously not a contemporary account of whatever went on, because the whole clean vs. unclean animal business didn't exist before the Torah.

Genesis 6 also talks about God regretting that He had created man, which appears as silly anthropomorphism if taken _au pied de la lettre_, so that isn't what's going on either.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

In the case of Japan, it wasn't a legend - as was recently demonstrated.

Closer to home there is Doggerland, about 8k2 years ago...

One tale, told by NW natives (Indians), is of a settlement that was completely inundated. A submerged forested area in Puget Sound got some of its old stumps carbon-dated, and we now know that the major earthquake that did it happened at 9 pm, January 26, 1700. So, legends aren't always nonfactual.

And, it involved the Juan de Fuca plate, named after a sailor who told tall tales in taverns, and sold his notes on an imaginary voyage to the REAL first European explorers in this area... so legends aren't always factual, either.

Then the flood should be considered an unreliable story tale.

Sure, everybody has always known about local floods. The mythic ones are world-spanning and sent as divine judgement--physical water isn't the interesting or important part.

In the ancient Near East, water was an image of chaos. In the Ba'al cycle, which was discovered and translated only very recently (pub date

2010 iirc), the original chief god was Yam, and his son was Nahar, lord of the rivers, who (the story says) were overthrown by Ba'al, allegedly on behalf of his father El, though El recedes from view shortly thereafter. (The "succession myth" of a successful rebellion by one of the subsidiary gods is common all over the world.)

So the flood stories are about the whole (highly civilized) world being overwhelmed by this picture of chaos and destruction, as a result of their wickedness, variously described.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Irving Finkel was involved with a replica of a different ark, one described on a cuneiform. The cuneiform prescription was very technical and precise, and the replica did float, but it was scaled down for cost reasons. Also the USA involvement in Iraq denied them the tar that was in the prescription, some leakage is attributed to that.

The conclusion is warranted that that ark could have worked, especially because god only ordered some livestock on that boat, not kangaroos and dinosaurs.

The creation museum ark in the USA certainly would not float. It is a facade on a concrete building.

Groetjes Albert