The video really doesn’t address my issues. To me, the Hebrew version of the Flood is just as much a fake as the churches that are built for the sake of a Saint Somebody - - where the Saint used to be a pagan god of one sort or another.
The Flood was an awful piece of divine wrath … not very sensible and all it does is muddle the theological situation…
Well thank you for giving it a chance. It starts from premises very different from yours and I think seeing things from outside of one’s own skin is harder for some than others and I have seen signs that it is harder for you than most.
Of course the same could be said of me regarding you. I don’t understand what your cryptic suggestions mean in this context.
If I am to explain the problem, I need to reflect your perceived reality better. You say you are Old Earther.
Okay… and in your scenario, does the Flood happen 4000 years ago? Or millions of years ago?
About 6,500 years ago, 4500 B.C. This is the date suggested by reading the genealogies the “long way”.
Really? 6500 years ago? I have forgotten since the excitement of our last discussions on the flood - - so please remind me - - in your mind was this a large regional flood? Or was it a global flood?
Regional, and not large regional, because the target was the line of Adam which had gone bad and not the race adam which is all of humanity. It did not extinct the whole human race, just Adam’s line, save for those on the ark.
PS- this date lines up with the oldest reasonable date for the sediments discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley as well as the long way to read the genealogies without gaps in time.
The Wooley Flood doesn’t even involve all of Sumeria … let alone all of Mesopotamia.
Any and all floods would have been adequate to inspire the story of the Genesis Flood… or even just the fictional stories from the earlier cultures could have inspired that part of Genesis.
I don’t say that Ur was where the flood happened. I think it happened in the highlands. Many of those valleys have rivers which pass through high and narrow channels. If the land behind them flooded it would be very slow to drain because of these choke-points. So the idea is that when the waters drained it caused secondary events. That was one of them. This is one place where the waters backed up and slowed down enough to drop even the fine sediments. What is it something like 15 feet worth?
I don’t think your scenario works out very well. Here is a map of the UR flood:
It comes from a speculative article at this URL:
Archaeological Discovery
Vol.03 No.01(2015), Article ID:52979,5 pages
10.4236/ad.2015.31003 The Flooding of Ur in Mesopotamia in New PerspectivesNils-Axel Mörner
●Abstract
●Full-Text PDF
●Linked References
●How to Cite this Article
Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm, SwedenEmail: morner@pog.nuAcademic Editor: Hugo G. Nami, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Departamento de Ciencias Geológicas, University of Buenos Aires, ArgentinaCopyright © 2015 by author and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.
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@anon46279830
Even if we reject the idea the flooding was triggered by a temporary rise in the sea level at that time, the limited nature of the Ur flooding (which has been frequently mentioned by researchers since Wooley’s initial discovery), does not support your particular “spin” on how events played out.
George that study doesn’t lay a glove on my hypothesis. They measured C-14 from marine shell sediments in Qatar in order to draw conclusions about what was going on in Ur. How useful can such a methodology be for detecting a flood that drains within one year? Such a method requires the change in sea level to last long enough for layers of marine creatures to build sediments with their shells.
As far as I can tell they didn’t even check against what the Arabian plate was doing geologically then- tipping a tiny bit more one way than another would alter the meaning of their findings.
But the real killer, besides their methodology not even being able to detect a temporary change in water level from a single-year flood, and the measurements being taken from 800 miles away, is that the timing is off by at least 1,000 years. The artifacts found immediately beneath the sediments in Ur are from the “Late Ubaid” (or more commonly now “Ubaid 4”) period. That was from more like 4,500 BC to 4,000 BC. I.E. 6500 to 6000 years ago. So the artifacts from Ur directly under those sediments are from an earlier period than the event described in this paper, which hardly seems significant enough to lay down the 16 feet or so of sediment Woolley discovered.
As I said, even if we don’t accept the main thesis of the article, it presents the range of the Wooley’s flood.
It was quite local, not even flooding all of Sumer, let alone all of the plain between the mountains and the sea.
I totally agree George. And that too fits in with my hypothesis. The flood was up in Anatolia and somewhat eastward in the Aras river valley. The rivers of Mesopotamia just got the drainage from it- swollen rivers with a few cities flooded.
The text says of Noah’s son’s families “as the journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar”. That means that they were NOT in Shinar when the flood hit. They were somewhere else and after the flood they went to Shinar (Mesopotamia). I think they were in the hills north and east of Shinar. That was what got flooded.
When the immediate descendants of Noah came down from the hills into “the land of Shinar” they found it was already full of other people. It is right there in the text if we will just see it.
So, you are going to use Wooley’s evidence of a flooded UR as proof that there was a flood wayyy up river?
What is your evidence of a flood way up river? You can’t use Wooley’s flood to prove a flood somewhere else.
But aren’t you the fellow who posted a study which posited flooding in Ur based on sea shells in Qatar?
But aren’t you the fellow who ignores what I write white I write it?
Below is my qualification when I originally posted the article. I included the article so that you would know the source of the map of the flood … not so you could fixate on the article and use it as an excuse for any of your favorite fantasies.
Here is a map of the UR flood:
^ Note the qualifications?!?!?
So you want to use the map from that study as evidence to convince me that my position on the flood is untenable, but it is no fair for me to read the methodology from the study from which the map is drawn? And is reading the methodology of a study which you did in fact post a link to the same as “fixating” on the study as you accuse me of doing? I am simply looking at the evidence you present. Deeper than you are comfortable with apparently.
Regardless of whether you acknowledged that the article is “speculative”, you posted the map from it as evidence that my “spin” on the text of early Genesis is “fantasy”.
This week I wrote on a marker-board at our host’s university that “All evidence is a mirror.” Whether it is anything more than that depends upon the heart and objectivity of the person looking into it. Without that, what we see in the evidence is more of a reflection of us than information about the natural (or supernatural) world.
For reasons of your own, you have made it clear that you do not want the text of early Genesis to be true. And there is no convincing most people who don’t want to see something about scripture to see that something. That is why you rush to dismiss what I say about it, before you even understand it, based on “evidence” which you rightly label “speculative” on your one hand even while you act as if this “evidence” makes my hypothesis implausible with your other hand.
There is indeed more evidence to support what I am saying. Not as much as there could be, because men have not looked in the right places yet. You used the word “prove” as if I can provide absolute proof. When @swamidass kept raising this objection when I used the word, I confess I thought it was just a rhetorical tactic or semantics. But now that someone is using it as you are on me, I see his beef.
None of these kinds of questions in science a matter of “proof” with certainty as with a mathematical proof. It is a matter of plausibility or implausibility. So “prove” can only be used in the less certain definitions of the word anyway. So in that sense demanding “proof” for these kinds of questions is too high a bar, but I believe that is what you want.
For some reason, you do not want early Genesis to contain accounts which are true. True as history, genuine as literature, and sound as spiritual guidance. And because you won’t see it, there is no point to trying to make you see something you don’t wish to see. It will only make you angry. I wish to spend my life finding people who would receive with joy any view of the text which would make early Genesis true on the basis I have described above. Because I have been given such a view. And for me, its liberating. For you, it’s not. That’s too bad, but I am not going to waste much more of my life trying to “prove” something to someone who is strongly personally opposed to even admitting that its a reasonable possibility when viewed through the proper lens of Christ. Someone who recoils at that is not in the place where we can engage in the mission of this blog “to understand and be understood.” I am sorry about that, but its not my doing.
I believe my objection was: you using the map of the flood to show that there was a flood … and that the flood was caused by a bigger flood up-river.
All you have to do is show me the evidence for the bigger flood up-river… and I’ll at least accept your methodology … even if I don’t accept your conclusions.
Not sure what map you mean but I am willing to give it one more try. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but how extraordinary a claim is it that sediment deposits at the mouth of a river system came from sediments from the high ground where the rivers have their sources? I mean no one doubts that the Nile Delta contains sediments from the mountains in Uganda where the Nile has its source, right? Or that the Mississippi Delta is build up with deposits which had their origin far to the north?
It is my hypothesis that these deposits were the result of a glancing blow from a regional flood which impacted the area to the north. Oceanographer Robert Ballard found in his explorations of the floor of the Black Sea that the freshwater Mollusk shells disappeared around 6,500 years ago (4,500 BC) or 7,000 years ago. They were eventually replaced with salt water mollusk some centuries later. Right around the time I am claiming for the southern flood as well. Two articles on that…
https://www.trussel.com/prehist/news210.htm
The articles keep mention 7,000 years ago as the flooding because that is when the salt water mollusks replaced the freshwater ones but the freshwater ones went away, then a small gap, then the salt water ones replaced them.
This is just to the north of my proposed target zone at the same time.
It is well-known that Lake Van had a dramatic 300 meter rise around 6,500 years ago. The methods they used to determine the time frame could not distinguish any time periods less than two or three centuries, but that does not mean it took three centuries to rise to that level or that even that was the highest level it ever reached. It was just the smallest time frame they could determine and the height was a good average in that time frame. Lake Van - Wikipedia
In 1953 Dr. Friedrich Bender carbon-dated a sample from a wood beam near Mr. Cudi (or Judi) which locals said was a beam from the ark. It’s carbon date was about 6500 years old. See page 112 (18/36) from this link http://www.biblearchaeology.org/publications/BAS19_4.pdf
Then there is Lake Urmia. Click on this link https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236178574_Hydroclimatic_variations_over_the_last_two_glacialinterglacial_cycles_at_Lake_Urmia_Iran
(click on the “full text PDF” button on the upper right). On page 15 (study page 658) just above conclusions it notes: “The Holocene record is unavailable due to the loss of the upper 4.5 m of sediment.” What? How did 4.5 meters of sediment get washed away right around the time I was interested in?
Look at the chart on page 13 (study page 656) closely. They took core samples corresponding to 200,000 years. Only once before in all that time was a layer of sediment lost from Lake Urmia. That was around 100,000 years ago and it was only about 1/10th the sediment lost in the Holocene. What happened in the last 10,000 years that took 10 times as much sediment as was taken in the last 200,000 years?
The idea that Ur would flood so dramatically, but nothing between it and a flood on the other side of the mountains doesn’t sound like a very plausible scenario. Frankly, it makes no sense at all.
I think you should get hold of more robust data.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322716302961
I found this URL when I was responding to another fellow’s flood theorizing (so a duplicate of the link is below):
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A fellow named Bill wrote on another blog:
Black Sea deluge is dated to around 5600 BCE and what I found for Sumeria was 5400 BCE so that is pretty much in the same ballpark. Never said I believed in a Regional Flood. Just the retelling of an earlier story with the details changed to fit what the writer was trying to say. Such as floating around for a year.
This was my response to his posting:
A close examination of the complexities displayed in Figure 15 shows that peat formation goes back more than 9000 years to 10,000 years ago (from the current surface elevation down to a little less than 50 meters). At this near 50m level, there isn’t any peat formation until well into the glacial period, some 21,000 years ago. The gap between the black line at 100m down (at 15,000 years) and rapid curve up to 0m down (at 9000 years) shows that the flooding didn’t start until 9000 years ago.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322716302961
Anastasia G. , Ryan W., McManus J. , Dimitrov P. , Dimitrov D., Slavova K., Filipova-Marinova M. (2016-2017), Compilation of geophysical, geochronological, and geochemical evidence indicates a rapid Mediterranean-derived submergence of the Black Sea’s shelf and subsequent substantial salinification in the early Holocene, Marine Geology. Vol. 383, 14-34.
The reason people want to believe the Black Sea Deluge occurred as recently as 5600 BCE is so they can corroborate the Ark story - - which, in reality, is no more corroborated than the more ordinary massive flooding in Mesopotamia. Why do I say that?:
Whether it be a Mesop. Flood, or a Black Sea Flood, the following logic still applies:
a) It would not take a year to find dry land;
b) It would not take a year for birds to find dry land;
c) It would not be necessary to stockpile animals and get on a boat, because “Hey, look behind you, higher ground!”
d) Any animals on the boat would have been part of a cargo to be delivered, not in anticipation of intentionally moving into the flooding waters, to stave off months of hunger;
e) There would have been no intrinsic logic of preserving mankind, as Noah stepped off the boat to be greeted by bewildered villagers, living at higher levels, asking: “Noah, didn’t you see us waving at you? We had barbecue and everything!”
The entire Flood story, from God’s early warnings, to the ark’s amazing dimensions, to its extended voyage, and the resulting survival of only one family, are all plot elements incompatible with any regional flood.
A massive flood story plotline can be inspired by a less massive flood. But none of the elements we actually find in the story of Noah is consistent with a “less massive flood”. And this is true whether it is an ANE regional flood or a Black Sea regional flood.
The story only makes sense if it was intended to mean a global deluge.
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“Evidence is a Mirror”
This is a perfect example. I want the changes in the Black Sea to be connected to the Deluge and you do not. So I focus on the switch in Marine Shell data which is a pretty good fit with the time line and you focus on peat formation which is a lousy fit with a 6,500 year old regional flood. You see in it the part you want and I see the part I want. Also the part I am looking at is a fairer measure.
If you will read the paper (yep, I did that again), you will see that it argues that the waters went DOWN during the Younger Dryas and went back up somewhat over time when it concluded. So yes, peat bogs started forming again once the cold dry spell of the YD ended. That is not as significant as the change over in marine life. Bogs form in Ireland and Scotland, lots of places. Its not because the whole land is about to be subject to a flood. There was several thousand years of gradual increase in shoreline once the YD ended, along with an increase in peat bogs, and then there was a big event at the end. That’s what the data is saying.
