Noahic flood interpretation under a non-fundamentalist view

[buffalo]

The Chiastic structure certainly shows how important Noah was. So important, that he was told ahead of time to build an Ark, and then a covenant after.

 

[Vonsalza]

LOL! I guess it all depends on how gullible you are. You asked the question yourself – it all depends on how loosey-goosey you’re willing to be!

What are you looking for? The date an orally transmitted story was first created in a time before written history?

I’ll repeat: …before written history?

You see the problem in your request, I hope?

God (or His rep) told me the dimensions of the boat? God asked me to gather my extended family? God asked me to cram all the kinds of animals in the boat? C’mon… it’s starting to strain credulity, don’t you think?

My point precisely. A prehistoric man built the largest wooden vessel ever constructed and it was structurally integral enough to float for months?

A funny fact, wooden vessels have a size limit after which they can’t structurally support themselves. If you took the life-sized ark in KY and put it in the ocean, a swell hitting the front of the boat would warp the timbers amidship so much that it would flood, if not outright disintegrate.

In short, the ark - especially if it was a simple box, was a structural impossibility. As a box, a simple current would have torn it apart.

Right. That’s why you asked about ‘loosey-goosey’. If you want to be really loose in your definition, you could say that Jesus’ lifetime, the Crusades, the man on the moon, and 9/11 were all ‘concurrent’.

Due to the lack of precise information when dealing with the prehistoric past, the time scales get bigger the further you go.

If the age of the Earth is a 24 hour day, recorded human history started in the last tenth of a second.

Agreed.

Good enough for me.

If, by that description, you simply mean “allegorical account of pre-historical incident, meant by the inspired author to tell a theological truth”, well… then I could say that that’s an “interpretation under a non-fundamentalist view.”

 

[buffalo]

The longest wooden ship ever built, the six-masted New England gaff schooner Wyoming, had a “total length” of 137 metres (449 ft) (measured from tip of jib boom (30 metres) to tip of spanker boom (27 metres)) and a “length on deck” of 107 m (351 ft).

The Chinese built some big one’s too.

 

[buffalo]

Athenaeus: The Deipnosophists​

But since we have mentioned the subject of the building of ships, let us speak (for it is worth hearing of) of the ships which were built also by PtolemyPhilopator, which are mentioned by the same Callixeinus in the first book of his Account ofAlexandria, where he speaks as follows:- "Philopator built a ship with forty ranks of rowers, being two hundred and eighty cubits long and thirty-eight cubits from one side to the other;

and in height up to the gunwale it was forty-eight cubits; and from the highest part of the stern to the water-line was fifty-three cubits; and it had four rudders, each thirty cubits long; [204] and oars for the thranitae, the largest thirty-eight cubits in length, which, from having lead in their handles, and because they were very heavy in the part inside the ship, being accurately balanced, were, in spite of their bulk, very handy to use.

http://www.attalus.org/old/athenaeus5b.html