Jesus also quoted quite a few people - like the owner of the vineyard. But no one is trying to show that the owner of the vineyard was Avraham bar Baruch, who lived 2 valleys over.
We don’t know if Noah was an actual person or a composite of Several people, nor when he may have lived (those who try to force genealogies will constantly run into problems, as the Jews had a different understanding of genealogy, than say the LDS church with its fascination of genealogy.
There is no evidence of a world wide flood within the time of known writing, which dates vback to about 3500 BC. There were known floods, due to the ending of the Great Ice Age, which ended somewhere around 11,000 BC to 15,000 BC. Two of those impacted the northwest US, one the Missoula floods, and the other the Bonneville flood. There also is evidence of major area floods in that general time range in the Asia/Middle East.
And someone took a potshot at the Gilgamesh; it is not the only story (as well as Noah) in other parts of the world.
It would appear that any story dating back to when there were known floods would have been passed down through oral history. And Oral history often has a consistency greater that we sometimes give it; when they only history which is passed down is oral, there is a strong tendency to maintain the story repetition accurately over generations. We need also to keep in mind that whomever Noah was, Noah was not a member of the Jewish faith or clans.
Again, trying to prove or disprove Noah misses why we have the story of Noah. It is not to [rove the truth of him and his lineage; it is given to show mankind’s relationship with God, and one of the number of covenants which God has made with mankind, and often specifically with the Jewish faith. And that - the theological point of the story - is why we have the story - whether Noah a specific individual existed, or the story is an amalgam of a number of people, or it is simply given without reference to any specific person.
There is evidence that within Scripture, the cosmology describes an earth with a bowl above it: Job 38: 18 “Do you spread out with him the fimament of the skies, hard as a brazen mirror?” Are we to believe that the waters which come down are held back by some giant domw, through which God lets the rains fall?
Only if we decide that we look to the Bible not for matters of faith, but matters of cosmology, or history according to 21st century concepts of matters 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 years ago.
Do I believe in Noah? My faith does not require that Noah was exactly as described, or sort of, or was an amalgam, or that the whole world was under water.
But that is not the intent of the story theologically. Trying to prove or disprove the story misses the point of it entirely.
