Perhaps Every Society that Ever Lived has a Flood Story



In the 1980's an engraved ancient piece of stone was showed to a British anthropologist. The stone had come from the Middle East some decades before. It was carbon dated 1500 to 1700 BCE. 

The stone detailed a flood story including a command from a long-age god giving orders that a boat be built that held pairs of all animals. Dimensions of the boat were detailed. This, of course, was not about Noah or the Christian God but about a more ancient society that worshipped the god popular at that time. The Noah story is one passed down from long before the Bible, even the Old Testament, was written. 

As discussed here often, all humans lived by water for most of our history. Bodies of water flooded and, in dark winter caves and around summer night fires, entertainment included stories about past floods. No doubt the taler the tale, i.e., the more exaggerated the flood story, the more entertaining it was to the listeners. One would think a society like ours with a high level of literacy and access the information would roundly debunk the Noah flood story. Not so.

Related is the amount of time humans have entertained each other with storytelling. When I started this blog there was a consensus human or human-like creatures had been present on the globe for 200,000 years. More discoveries and debate have moved the consensus to possibly 300,000 years. That addition increased the time of storytelling in dark caves by 50%. 

Today I have the chance to visit with an old friend who is a self-trained archologist and participates in digs and follows the literature. He told me of being in the Philippines recently. He said there is an on-going dig that has found bones with teeth marks and stone tools used to butcher that have no other source but human or human-like beings. They are 900,000 years old. Perhaps we have had that many years of flood stories.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ancient God, Bel (Baal), the Main Character in an Ancient Play

Image
In a British museum is a preserved stone tablet from Babylon. It dates to about 2,000 BCE. Someone labored patiently to inscribe an entire passion play featuring the god Bel. I reiterate this is a stone tablet, not a recopied papyrus. The play begins with the god Bel arrested by soldiers and taken off the stage. He reappears at a trial in the Hall of Judgement. Bel is innocent but is sentenced to death. In the next scene Bel is accosted by a mob. He is despised and rejected. The actor playing Bel is then taken by guard to a hilltop in a sacred grove. Two criminals are taken with him. One of these is released. The the audience then leaves the theater and follows the actor Bel and his guards to the top of a hill where the death scene is enacted by hanging from a tree. The audience returns to the theater for the dramatic final scenes. The dead Bel is stripped and prepared for burial. On a theatrical hill to the side of the stage is a tomb where the body is placed. A stone is rolle...
Read more

What Was the "Argument" in the Election

Image
I hate to add my blog to the piles of blogs and pundits analyzing and pondering the meaning of the just passed election. But that's what I feel like doing today. I've always like Senator Ted Cruz's summary of politics. He once said, "First, win the argument. Then, win the election." I think there is a way of applying that to anti abortion Catholics and Protestants. The link talks of Catholics who now feel they have no political home because Republicans let them down with Trump but they remain against abortion rights. Taking Cruz's win-the-argument thesis, I'd call the past election about an argument between two groups. One group's argument was, "Trump's a jerk." The other's argument was, "Abortion is wrong." The group, "Trump's a jerk," won the argument and then the election.  While one can argue the election, or any election, it about more complex issues, I believe in the end elections hinge on very simple ar...
Read more

Will We Ever Know How Accurate Current Bibles Are

Image
When I discuss the many times the Bible was copied and recopied by scribes over a couple of thousand years, the reply is often, "I have a book by this (or that) expert who says the Bible is 99% accurate to its original writers." The 99% claim appears in various places defending the Bible. There is one thing we know absolutely: There is no surviving original copy of the Bible. Even the oldest surviving material is a generation or two after the time some of the Bible was written. This means no one can claim he has, or ever will, compare the current Bible to the original Bible and find the two are 99% the same. We cannot claim either that it is not 99% accurate. For the sake of discussion, however, assume the current Bible is 99% accurate. That would mean the one word out of every 100 was inaccurate. It could still mean an important misreading of the original text. An example is the passage referring to punishment for a man who kills a fetus. In the oldest know materia...
Read more