So the flood didn't happen.....

by snare&racket 65 Replies latest jw friends

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  Phizzy

  Mr Freeze, I am no apologist for the Bible, it is full of errors, mistakes, contradictions and an awful lot of very poor quality fiction.

  But I just like to see people use fair argumentation, otherwise apologists can shoot you out of the water. I base what I said about the Hebrew of Genesis allowing for it not to be a Global flood, and therfore not necessarily wiping out all mankind, on an article written a few years ago by Ray Franz.

  I have the greatest respect for Ray, and the kind of honourable loving man he was, I do not go along with all the argument in his essay, I think he is stretching things a bit, in his desire to still view the bible as the word of god. But he does argue well that Genesis, if read properly, does not have to be taken as entirely an allegory.

  The essay was available on-line via Commentary Press, I am not sure if it still is.

  mP, it does say the waters covered the highest mountain, but Ray deals with that in his essay, what I cannot understand is that people are arguing against the truth of the story from a an ex-Bible-literalist point of view, they have not grasped that to understand what the writer of ancient texts actually was saying you have to take into account his knowledge, theology, the political/religious situation of his time, his agenda and a hundred and one other things.

  Once you know how to read such texts, then you can begin to see the real problems with them, and not pose false problems which were not in the writers mind in the first place, i.e a world-wide flood in the geographic sense we understand it.

  The Bible cannot mean now what it did not mean then.
• 

  St George of England

  Perhaps at this point someone should introduce the quack science, so loved by the WTS, of the water canopy...............

  George
• 

  humbled

  WTS
• 

  Phizzy

  I see the poor benighted WT still refer to a Global Flood, they did so in a very recent publication.

  Not necessary, and surely shooting themselves in the foot quite badly, it only takes something like that to be questioned by a JW with an honest heart and the whole house of cards falls down, if the WT can't get that right, what can they? such a person may well ask.

  As per my post above, such a simple error shows that the WT has no knowledge of how to read and understand an ancient text, so how can their explanations of any scripture be trusted ?
• 

  transhuman68

  The Flood story is most likely an adaption of the Gilgamesh epic, and floods seem to have been common in the area that is now Iraq.

  This is part of the account of Sir Charles Woolley digging at the Ziggurat of Ur in 1922:

  Soon a discovery of a very different kind was made. The royal graves had been reached through layers of household rubbish, the accumulation of many centuries; but suddenly the nature of the earth below the domestic debris changed into clean fresh water clay without a particle of human remains or artifacts. This, however, was not the real surprise. The surprise was that after going down a further eight feet the explorers hit rubbish again as suddenly as the earlier layer had ceased. The layer of unadulterated clay could only be the result of some vast spread of water. In 1929, Woolley concluded these were traces of the Great Deluge of the Bible, and sent back to London an electrifying telegram: `We have found the Flood.'

  Flooding was, of course, common enough in the lower reaches of the two rivers, but this flood must have been colossal-covering perhaps an area 400 miles long and 100 miles wide. This is four-fifths of the size of England, or about the same size as Virginia or Ohio, but to the people of that age, it was their whole world. One further fact Woolley noticed. Though much of the pottery above and below the seam of pure clay was of the same kind, some that appeared below the seam did not reappear above it. Hence, he concluded, a whole community and its skills had been entirely wiped out in the catastrophe, which occurred some time between 3000 and 4000 BC. But was it the Bible Flood? Other excavations in Mesopotamia and elsewhere have revealed the occurrence of many floods at different times and at different levels, and archaeology has also unearthed other versions of the story of the Deluge than the well-known account in the Old Testament Book of Genesis.

  - Ronald Harker
• 

  Heaven

  Phizzy, I don't see how you can equate the flood story to just a region of the Earth with scriptures like this:

  "For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die."

  This is a pretty all encompassing, global sounding statement to me. If God really meant I will destroy only evil people in the, say, Mesopotamian Valley, then he shoulda said that. God meant to not only destory humans, but ALL flesh in which their is breath of life. This includes more than humans.
• 

  cantleave

  God meant to not only destory humans, but ALL flesh in which their is breath of life. This includes more than humans.

  What a bastard!
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  mP

  I was watching a doco the other day about Iraq, and apparently until Saddam dried them up there were marshes in the south of Iraq that covered thousands of square kms. They are formed by the two rivers flooding. The place is recovering now its already filled with wildlife. I never knew there was such a thing in Iq previously. Its easy to see how this could be an area of flood.
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  jgnat

  heaven, you think the bible is absent of hyperbole? How about building a Godly motivation AFTER a catastrophic flood?
• 

  Dismissing servant

  That never happened??? :-O