While it is fascinating and surprising that many whale skeletal fossils have been discovered in what is now the Sahara Desert, strong evidence the Shara was once under substantial sea water, alas it was 43,000,000 years ago** and no humans would be around for any mythmaking for roughly another 42,000,000 years. Doesn't it cause some pause to reflect on the fact that despite LOTS of archaeological digging in the Sahara (and basically everywhere else on Earth) that no evidence of worldwide water or inhabitants has ever been found? I hesitate to resort to cheap humor, but isn't that just a wee bit "fishy"?

Again, I don't see how this devalues the Flood Myth. Not only does it make sense considering how isolated most ancient civilizations were, but it does tell us that views were at one time indeed very provincial and delineates the timing of the progression to a truly global perspective.... well excepting those individuals and organizations that insist the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old . So much for Gilgamesh, eh?

** Citation - https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/10316...-million-years

What I find fascinating about the Biblical flood, as against the Babylonian one, is that it combines what is clearly a version of the latter with what I can only describe as Something Else. The Babylonians presented the flood simply as an interruption of history. As soon as the waters have receded, everything goes back to the way it was before. There were actually Sumerian cities like Erech which claimed to have been founded before the flood. And this is just what you would expect if the source material was a historical event, a widespread flood in Mesopotamia.

The Bible has a much weirder version. It presents an antediluvian world in which everything was different from the world we live in now. Time moved at a completely different speed so that people regularly lived for centuries. In addition, the geography was different: the Nile has a common source with the Tigris and the Euphrates! Eden is still a known location, which has to be guarded against resettlement; Cain settles to the east of it.

Then comes the flood and wipes that world out for ever. When the waters recede, the world that emerges is clearly the one we live in now. Within a couple of generations, lifespans have shrunk from the mythological to the merely legendary. The three sons of Noah are presented as the ancestors of the peoples whom the ancient Jews knew: eastern semites, Egyptians/Canaanites, and the People of the Sea. Soon the first ziggurat is going up in Babylon.

I don't think there is any parallel to this kind of archaic catastrophe anywhere else in the ancient east but there are parallels elsewhere. From William Blake to the Australian aborigines, there are haunting stories of a "dream time", a kind of overlap between time and eternity, when everything was different and humans had godlike powers. This is the kind of thing that I find fascinating about mythology.

The Bible account isn't just in the Bible on it's own. I have the James Perloff quote in post #191. If you take 66% (of over 200 flood myths) as the cutoff point, you get The majority of his 200+ legends have the essentials of the Bible's account.

What's also interesting is that Noah's (second born)son Shem seems to have emerged as the patriarch. The Jews were descended from Shem, and have next to nothing on pre-flood times in their traditions. Shem also outlasted his brothers. Josephus who drew on Jewish traditions, had exactly nothing on the pre-flood days. Jewish tradition also links Shem as being Melchizidek who had no genealogy (Hebrews 7:1,2). His birth was before the Flood. Jewish tradition is just that - uninspired tradition. Take it or leave it, but don't argue it.

Shem's two brothers (Ham & Japhet) may have told more tales. Greek and other pantheons of human-like gods also have 'demi-gods.' Usually this is a male God & female consort. The early verses of genesis 6 have mention of 'the sons of God having relations with the daughters of men', and Nephilim being born, who would have been 'demi-gods.' Interestingly, there is very little mention of the children of demi-gods, as hybrids are usually infertile.

Sorry, business_kid, but not only The Flood Myth but quite literally EVERYTHING referred to in the Christian Bible happened in a tiny circle around The Fertile Crescent, that doesn't even make up a full single digit percentage of global surface area. Global Flood never happened. "Wortld" flood depends on subjective definition of "world" and what ancients considered "the world" should be entirely obvious.

Consult any credible Geologist, Archaeologist, Paleontologist, Biologist, Astronomer, or for that matter, most serious professional biblical scholars. Not only is there no evidence for any global flood ever, there exists tons of evidence beginning more that 200 years ago that it couldn't have occurred under any circumstances excepting wand-waving magic, not only to get the water here on Earth (windows in the firmament, Space made of water, indeed!), but remove it and any evidence it was ever here.

It's allegory, Brother, not a newspaper.

"It's a myth, savvy?!"

And, particularly in these very early chapters of Genesis which describe "extremely old" events leading up to and including "the dawn of man," it is also quite apparent that much of the ancient mythology has been lost. At one time there might have existed a lot more information about the obvious "demi-gods," "giants," "almost thousand-year-old humans," and so-forth which were said to have existed.

"And then 'The Flood' came ..." The ancient world's "Great Reset?" So far as I am aware, the missing pieces are gone for good.

All that we have left are, as @hazel correctly observed, "a set of 'chapters' which are" ... as we contemplate "what little remains" ... "decidedly weird and entirely unexplainable." The rest of whatever "context" that once might have existed has now been lost. We can no longer piece it together. (These were, of course, "entirely oral traditions," passed down verbally from father to son, so there are no "written records" to be discovered now.)

"Greek and Roman" mythologies, of course, are thousands of years younger, and they were written down. They are actually almost "contemporary."

To get a feel for how long ago such word-of-mouth myths beginnings were, Cleopatra's life is closer to the first Moon landing than she was to the time of the construction of great pyramids at Giza. I disagree with sundialsvcs that "millions and billions" are merely "hand-waving" terms, but I totally agree that no amount of study will likely ever reveal much more than the murky little tidbits we currently have pre-histoiry. We may glean a lot in the areas that leave evidence but as for how these folks thought, what mattered most to them, all we have is Myth and commonly that is only congratulatory stories to gain favor with narcissistic leaders, at least at their start. Later they tend to become celebrations, bragging rights of a dynasty that merely reflects on it's people. The people details are lost and the leader details are boastful.

No wonder Percy Shelley wrote the poem "Ozymandias". Such narcissistic leaders are common even in 2022. Myth tells us it is part of the Human Condition.

"Worse yet, @enorbet," so much now of the mythology is also "lost."

Of course, it must be recognized that these things were "already lost" at the time that the scribes who captured "the first few chapters of Genesis" actually did so. Yes, their writings were then dutifully recorded and preserved, but the "record" is now very simply full of holes which now can never be filled. Identical realities can be found with regard to any writings (of verbal accounts ...) of similar age. "It simply isn't there anymore."

^^ All too true, sundialsvcs. I suspect we've all played The Gossip Game in school where a simple message is whispered in the ear of the person next to you and even with just a handful of people what #1 said to #2 is VERY different from what #9 said to #10. Just imagine how different that could be if those kids spoke different languages. Then for good measure imagine each participant must wait even a week before passing on the message.

Hello all. Sorry to resurrect an oldie but goodie but it seemed better than starting a new thread and it bears mightily on the thread subject. Even in the 21st Century there are words that lose their previously recognized meaning because we lose the context. Anyone born before 1980 or so remembers a time without computers, without the internet and without "stanger danger" where kids commonly left home to play outside each morning and parents had little or no idea where they were until dinner time. I'm quite confidant those born after 2000 have very little understanding of what that was like, what concerns people had and didn't have, and that change took place in just a couple decades.

Most Myth comes to us from a vastly foggier time span. I stumbled into this BBC article that can help create a context for how much has been lost and how little we can relate. Some things always remain much the same since Homo Sapiens have so much in common, but the details matter. How different might your life be, how different YOU might be, had you been born to another family, in a different location, at a different level of wealth, influence and freedom... or at a different time?

If such pondering interests you, you will probably enjoy this - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...-to-the-future

At the risk of coming off as a rude nitpicker; confidant is a trustworthy person to confide in, the word you want is confident.

(I wouldn't normally pick on spelling mistakes where the meaning is clear from context anyway, but since you mentioned words losing their meaning...)

Hello ntubski - I did also mention "context", did I not?

It is also of great concern to modern librarians and archivists how easily – and, how permanently – our "digital record" can be lost. For instance, the US Government now has more than a million reels of magnetic tape which can no longer be read because, if a tape remains wound-up long enough, the magnetic regions can migrate towards and away from the center of the spool. Magnetic disk drives can "crash" and otherwise stop working. Even supposedly-archival options such as "magneto-optical" proved not to be.

"The Wayback Machine" is a modern-day effort to create some sort of "archival record" of the Internet as it exists today. But it is woefully incomplete.

Paper and film records can be preserved, albeit at very considerable ongoing and never-ending expense.

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Unfortunately, it is very possible for even our very-recently-made "works" to simply be ... gone forever. Indeed, perhaps now more than ever.

Perhaps God preserving his 10 commandments on tablets of stone had the jump on everybody! Even the clay teblets used in ancient times lasted thousands of years. Trouble is, we have too much to say.

Today I watched a restored and colorized film from 1908 of a demonstration flight by the Wright Brothers. It was wonderful to see. I'm very thankful such an historical document has been digitized and saved. The only means of insuring long term storage of historically significant data is largely like personal backups - more than 2 copies, more than 2 locations.

Here's is an overview of the US Govt strategy https://www.archives.gov/preservatio...ation/strategy.

Regarding "God's preserving", I think it is important to realize that clay and stone had been in use by mere humans for thousands of years by the time any ancient moral philosophies were allegedly discovered by Moses, let alone collated into the Christian Bible. It's not at all like it was some new revealed invention. This documentation is in no way to be interpreted as being insignificant, far from it! It's just that it is significant however it came to be and that it managed to be preserved, though AFAIK no discovery of those tablets has ever been found. Individually, they didn't last if they ever actually and physically existed instead of just "in spirit". The philosophy was "in the air" in any case.

There are those who theorize that the cuneiform clay tablets might have been used with soft clay in some kind of shallow wooden box that you could easily hold in your hand. This would allow the writing to be obliterated and the tablet re-used any number of times using a simple rolling pin. No one will know for sure, as wood did not survive the centuries while the clay tablets eventually dried out. But it is an interesting and practical idea. In most cases where we have found and decoded the inscriptions, they were "routine business transaction records," not something calling for posterity. Maybe they were erasable.