The Rainbow as a sign to Noah

by Simon 43 Replies latest jw friends

  • logical
    logical

    Aaron

    Dont worry about it, these antigods dont care, they just pick the scriptures apart applying them to evil for their own amusement.

  • Faraon
    Faraon

    Crossroads,
    >Why is he mad at all the animals and not the sea creatures?
    Is it because HE has know way of destroying them?

    The whole thing is a fable. It is so ridiculous only funnymentalists believe it.
    Most sea creatures had to be killed in this deluge since the mayority of salt water animals will die in fresh water and viceversa.

    Plants had to also die due to the fact that they were submerged in salt water for a year.

    The dimensions of the ark would not allow for the minimum 1,800,000 animals to live there and there was not enough personnel to take care of them. The gasses and feces had to provide an intolerable breathing atmosphere.

    The only light and air coming into the ark had to come through a 1 1/2 feet hole.

    Why didn't Yaweh just kill off the nephilim and mankind?

    See the sites previously mentioned in this thread for more info.

    JRP
    If I wanted your opinion, I would beat it out of you (seen in a bumper sticker)

  • crownboy
    crownboy

    After the flood waters subsided, shouldn't there have been a large number of dead, stink, wet-rotting bodies? I'm pretty sure that corpses submerged in water for a year don't just disappear (all those scavenger birds that will be there at Armageddon were all presumably dead ), so how come nothing is ever mentioned of this?

    Go therefore and baptize the people in the name of the father and of the son... what the hell, we just need to bring up the yearbook numbers!

  • OUTLAW
    OUTLAW

    Hey Simon,Its sunlight and water that make the rainbow,rainbows are so cool.The bible says it rained 40 days and 40 nights.In some ancient eastern literature the number 40 is not meant as a literal number.It is meant as a cultural saying.What it means is: "many,many"or It rained many,many days and nights.Another good example would be Ali-Baba and the fourty thieves.It didn`t mean he actually hung out with 40 thieves.It meant he hung out with many,many thieves..MERRY CHRISTMAS...OUTLAW

  • GinnyTosken
    GinnyTosken

    This is from The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara J. Walker under the heading "Flood":

    The biblical flood story, the "deluge," was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero's name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon he was Uta-Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters subsided, with the help of his wife Pyrrha and the advice of the Great Goddess of the waters, Themis. In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros--a corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra--whose ark landed on Mount Ararat.

    According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was told by his god, "Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of all that has life." Technical instructions followed: the ark was to be 600 cubits long by 60 wide, with three times 3600 measures of asphalt on its exterior and the same amount inside. Three times 3600 porters brought chests of provisions, of which 3600 chests were for the hero's immediate family, while "the mariners divided among themselves twice three thousand six hundred chests." It seems that Noah's ark was much smaller than earlier heroic proportions.

    As long ago as 1872, George Smith translated the Twelve Tablets of Creation from Ashurbanipal's library, and discovered the earlier version of the flood myth. Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly children drowned. Mother Ishtar severely punished the disobedient god by cursing him with her "great lightnings." She set her magic rainbow in the heavens to block his access to offerings on earthly altars, "since rashly he caused the flood-storm, and handed over my people to destruction."

    Old Testament writers copied other details of the ancient flood myth but could not allow their god to be punished by the Great Whore of Babylon, as if he were a naughty child sent to bed without supper by an angry mother. Thus, they transformed Ishtar's rainbow barrier into a "sign of the covenant" voluntarily set in the heavens by God himself (Genesis 9:13).

    The Tigris-Euphrates valley was subject to disastrous floods. One especially was long remembered; geologists have linked it with the volcanic cataclysm that blew apart the island of Thera (Santorin) and destroyed Cretan civilization. When Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating the site of Ur, he found the track of a mighty flood--a layer of clay without artifacts, eight feet thick. Such a flood may have been identified with the watery Chaos that all Indo-European peoples believed would swallow up the world at the end of its cycle, and out of which a new world would be reborn in the womb of the Formless Mother. The ark and its freight represented seeds of life passing through the period of Chaos from the destruction of one universe to the birth of the next. Even in the Bible, the "birth" was heralded by the Goddess's yonic dove (Genesis 8:12).

    Gnostic literature preserved the older view of the flood-causing God as an evil destroyer of humanity, and the Goddess as its preserver. Because people refused to worship him alone, jealous Jehovah sent the flood to wipe out all life. Fortunately the Goddess opposed him, "and Noah and his family were saved in the ark by means of the sprinkling of light that proceeded from her, and through it the world was again filled with humankind."

    For those who want to read more, the following books are referenced in this article:

    The Greek Myths, Robert Graves
    Middle Eastern Mythology, S.H. Hooke
    Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, W.R. Lethaby
    Gods, Graves, and Scholars, C.W. Ceram
    Assyrian and Babylonian Literature, Selected Translations
    Epic of Gilgamesh
    Shakti and Shakta, Arthur Avalon
    The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels

    Ginny

  • SixofNine
    SixofNine

    quoth the butthead, "hhheheheh, she said yonic dove, hhheheheh"

  • HappyHeathen
    HappyHeathen

    Here's a little logic problem for the fundies.

    There are currently hundreds of species of tigers alone (not sure how many exactly). As Farkel mentioned, Noah and his family would have had to gather not one pair of tigers but hundreds of pairs of tigers. The only other explanation for existence all the specie types would be that they brought one pair into the ark and over the last four thousand years all these species have evolved on their own, but that would mean ....uh oh, proof of that old bugaboo EVOLUTION. Can't win on this one.

    HH

    HH

  • aChristian
    aChristian

    Jez,

    You wrote: And it had never rained before thus had never seen a rainbow before.

    Not so. The Bible does not say that it never rained before Noah's flood, or that the rainbow God used as a sign was the first one to ever appear in earth's skies. It only says that God told Noah that the Rainbow would, from then on, serve as a sign of His promise to never again use a flood to bring a destructive judgment upon the world.

    The Romans used crosses to execute criminals before and after Christ died on one. This fact has not in any way diminished the cross as an effective sign of Jesus Christ. In the same way, God's use of a previously existing physical phenomena, the rainbow, to remind Noah of a promise did not in any way diminish the rainbow as a sign of that promise.

    The Bible tells us that God has used various things at various times as "signs." Among them have been blood, circumcision and a regular day of rest. None of these signs has ever been something that was completely new to the earth or to the human race. So it was with the rainbow.

    Mike

  • JW4fr
    JW4fr

    aC: For your information. Jesus did not die on a cross. He died on a stake. The word cross is a mistranslation of the greek word stauros. Check out Vines Dictionary of Biblical Words. In it you will find that the real meaning of stauros is an upright stake or pole with no cross piece attached. So your argument falls kind of flat. Sorry.

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    To JW4fr:

    Like you, I once uncritically accepted the Watchtower Society's claims about this.
    However, when I did a bit of my own research I found that they had deliberately
    misrepresented matters.

    It's true that the basic meaning of "stauros" is "upright stake" or even "tree", but a
    cross certainly fits those definitions just as well as a simple stake does. Further,
    ancient historical documents prove that the Romans used a variety of forms of
    "stauros" to execute people, including simple stakes and more complicated crosses.

    The Society's Kingdom Interlinear and NWT contain appendices that purport to use
    a drawing from an ancient historical document to prove the Society's claims. The
    drawing is of someone being executed on a simple stake. However, the Society's
    writer fails to inform the reader that this historical document also contains about 30
    other drawings of various "stauros" devices, about 3/4 of which are crosses of various
    sorts. So the very document that the Watchtower writer uses to support his claim
    actually tends to disprove it, if one accepts the weight of historical evidence.

    If a religious organization has to resort to outright deception to 'prove' its teachings,
    you can be assured that something is very wrong both with the teachings and the
    organization. The fact is that there is not enough evidence today to say with certainty
    just what was the precise form of "stauros" Jesus was supposed to be executed on.

    AlanF

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