Noahic flood interpretation under a non-fundamentalist view

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Mike_from_NJ said:
A local flood also doesn’t work since the supposed impetus for the flood was that God regretted creating humanity. It wouldn’t makes sense then to leave numerous civilizations alive if the whole of humanity were to be wiped out.
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Well, keep this in mind. In ancient times, all of the big cities were on the water. And the majority of humans lived walking distance to the water.

Also, it doesn’t say planetary event… it says “worldwide.” The word “world” doesn’t only mean the planet. It also means the relative part of the world a person lives in or is familiar with.

That’s what it’s ok to say something Americans and Vietnamese live in different worlds. But you can’t say they live ON different worlds.

Point is, the flood very well could have been a cataclysmic event that affected Noah’s world, but not the entire planet.
 
buffalo said:
There is mounting evidence of a global event that Catholics do not have to deny the reality of Noah’s flood. This can no longer be used against Catholics and other Christians.
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I want to ask you a serious question. When you say a global flood, do you mean where the entire planet was covered with water and everything died except Noah and those aboard the ark?

Or do you mean something happened that caused multiple major floods around the world? For example a super earthquake under the Atlantic Ocean that caused a major title wave to wash over the mediterranean?

The waterworks earth did happen, but that was long before humans.

Personally, I beleive there was a flood, but that it did not literally cover every single piece of land on the planet. But rather distorted a major metropolis in the Ancient World - Atlantis anyone?
 
Look, folks. Look at the text.

All the stuff in Genesis about Eden, and the Flood, and so on, is about –

The Eretz. That means, “The Land.” What would later be called the Promised Land. Specifically, Israel and environs.

The rest of the world clearly existed… but the author of Genesis wasn’t writing about the rest of the world, except peripherally. (Like what tribes in other parts of the world were related.)

So while it’s not clear whether or not the Flood was doing anything anywhere else or not, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether humans and animals continued to survive “on the Eretz.” (ba 'ares is the phrase, which shows up again and again.)

The thing that is offensive to God, according to the Bible, is that God’s special land, the Holy Land, right on the doorstep of Eden, is filled with nasty people who only do nasty things.

Nobody is concerned about what is happening anywhere else. So nobody is concerned about what punishment is happening anywhere else.

Now, historically or rather, paleogeologically, there were a lot of Very Bad Things that happened with floods and tsunamis in the Mediterranean area, as well as the Paleolithic flooding of the Mediterranean when the Atlantic Ocean first got over the strip of land at Gibraltar. And so on.

There were a lot of civilization-collapsing events in the olden days, sad to say, so you can take your pick. The entire Greco-Roman city of Myra, and the original basilicas of St. Nicholas, are about 30 feet under farmland, thanks to a big historical flood (and changes in silting patterns, and a lot of other stuff that happened for hundreds of years beforehand).

I guarantee that if you were God, and you just planned things out to make a meteor hit somewhere in the ocean, you could probably make a chain of connected events flood just about everywhere human-habitable. But according to the actual words of the Bible, you just have to flood out the Eretz, not the entire globe.

We don’t need to know the exact whys and wherefores, although it would be nice to know. Clearly something very bad happened, and the effects were a really bad flood.
 
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You are starting with the premise that Everest, at its current (or similar) height, preceded the flood.Even with the currently popular idea of plate tectonics, the topography of the Earth has changed over time. I used to believe that, too. However, based on Hydroplate Theory, proposed by Walt Brown, Ph.D., the worldwide flood itself caused the mountains. Laugh if you want to, but until you’ve seen the theory in its totality, you should reserve judgment.
 
It was (I now believe) a worldwide cataclysmic event, caused by the fountains of the deep erupting through the surface of the Earth.
 
Yes! And if Noah was not an historical figure, then Jesus was lying at worst, or leading people astray at best.
 
What the Bible says that God said is:

“I will wash/wipe man (ha’adam), whom I have created, off the dirt’s face (pene ha’adamah). For I am sorry that I have made them: man and animal and creeping thing and birds of the air.”

But other than making the obvious continuing pun on how Adam was made from dirt (and okay, it’s funny to wipe a human off the dirt’s face instead of dirt off a human’s face), the text promptly gets back to ha 'ares this and ha 'ares that.

And when God talks to Noah, He warns that He is going to destroy – yup, you guessed it, ha 'ares.

So again, while there is nothing to say it wasn’t a global flood, there’s nothing to say that it was. Nobody involved with the text really cares about any land except the Land.
 
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So, are you saying he only destroyed some of what he created? He was only sorry that He created SOME of the “men, and animals, and creeping things, and birds of the air”? That’s not my understanding of those (and related ) verses, but I look forward to seeing what others have to say.
 
I forgot to say that the Genesis text is also an apologetics text, because the Babylonians and other Middle Eastern cultures had similar stories which attributed a Great Flood of the Mesopotamian area to their gods, for somewhat similar reasons.

But as I’ve mentioned on the forums before, the Sumerians and Babylonians taught their people that humans were created specifically to be slaves of the gods who fed and amused the gods. Even the king got ceremonially slave-slapped every year, so he would remember that he was just scum. In the epic of Gilgamesh, we learn that a council of the gods decided to flood the land and kill their human slaves because humans were noisy and annoying. Another god who disagrees decides to warn the king of an important city, Shuruppak, to prepare a ship to save the lives of… useful and amusing human slaves, like musicians. (Because living without human slaves would be inconvenient, after you got over your tantrum.)

The king is specifically instructed, by this ‘wise’ god Ea, to lie to his people about what he is doing and why; and he obeys. Everybody in the city helps him build the boat, and they are told that its completion will trigger a bountiful time of celebration and blessing from the gods. Instead, these other nice helpful slaves all die.

(Oh, and later in the story, Ea also lies to his fellow gods. He’s so wise and thoughtful…)

So it’s important that God is offended by evil deeds and thoughts, and by violence in His holy Land, not by ordinary human life. Noah and his family are saved by God because they are good, not because they are slave kings of temple slaves. (And God isn’t a big fat liar.)

The whole story is written in a form that is basically a reprimand of the Babylonians, for believing in gods who just do things at random, and don’t care about humans as persons.
 
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The text says that the humans in the Land, by acting in an evil and corrupt way, also corrupted everything else in the Land.

And this makes sense, because we’d just been told that Adam and Eve were in charge of taming the creatures of the Land, and that Adam had named the animals. Naming is an act of being in charge, of having things in your household and under your control.

So if the humans in the Land were not taking proper care of the Land, and were messing up the animals in the Land… well, we’ve all seen humans make a good puppy into a bad dog. And it’s very common for the bad dog to become so dangerous that he has to be killed.

So sure, I see no problem with theorizing that only the animals in the Land were contaminated. You could go either way; the text isn’t talking about anything happening anywhere to anything, except to critters in the Land.

Also, notice that God has no beef against the fish and sea creatures. Often they are depicted as forces of evil or chaos, whom only God can tame. But the other side is that man and the Land don’t have much to do with them, so they aren’t depicted as being affected by human evil in the Land. If God was really sick of His entire Creation, He’d have planned to kill the fishies, too.

Noah, on the other hand, is a good guy, and can be trusted to take care of the animals on the Ark. He and his family are not going to corrupt them.

Shrug. Like I say, I’m just going by what it says on the page. Obviously not everything that happens is written down; but this is what is said.
 
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I mean clearly he was only sorry that he created Some of the things because he didn’t actually destroy all of everything by any account (he saved Noah and some of everything else).
 
CrangesMcBasketball said:
Merely mentioning Noah doesn’t confirm his historicity. People quote/mention fictional and mythological characters all the time.
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Here is the text:

Matthew: 2437 'As it was in Noah’s day, so will it be when the Son of man comes.

38 For in those days before the Flood people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands,right up to the day Noah went into the ark,

39 and they suspected nothing till the Flood came and swept them all away. This is what it will be like when the Son of man comes.

40 Then of two men in the fields, one is taken, one left;

Luke 17: 26 'As it was in Noah’s day, so will it also be in the days of the Son of man.

27 People were eating and drinking, marrying wives and husbands, right up to the day Noah went into the ark, and the Flood came and destroyed them all.

28 It will be the same as it was in Lot’s day: people were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building,
 
He could just be talking about the well-known story. He could also have said “When the Son of man comes it will be like how everything seemed hopeless and destructive like in Lord of the Rings before Rohan shows up at the battle of Pelinor Fields.” Doesn’t mean he thought it literally happened or that the entire world was flooded.
 
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Atreju said:
He could just be talking about the well-known story. He could also have said “When the Son of man comes it will be like how everything seemed hopeless and destructive like in Lord of the Rings before Rohan shows up at the battle of Pelinor Fields.” Doesn’t mean he thought it literally happened or that the entire world was flooded.
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Jesus the Son of God surely must have known if it was true or not.
 
The CIA has a photo labeled “Ararat Anomaly.” Since Mount Ararat is under the control of Turkey, the Turkish government has restricted access, but the photo does show a portion of a large object.
 
Mike_from_NJ said:
Could be one area was particularly evil … a Soddom and Gommorah.
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It’s humanity as the writer knows it to exist. So, to him, it’s “global”. It could have been a regional or super-regional event, and he would have perceived it as “the whole earth.”
Also the story has an intentional cause and effect: People are bad therefore they get killed by God in the form of a flood.
The fact is the text can not be rescued.
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Only if your desire is to see it quashed prevents you from attempting to rescue it. 😉

Here’s the thing: the story starts out “God saw that humans were evil, so He decided to wipe out all the evil people and leave only the eight good people.” The story ends with both Noah and his son doing some pretty bad things. (Some folks think that the story ends with the rainbow. It doesn’t.)

So, as you approach this story, you can go with one of two angles:
  • God doesn’t know what He’s talking about. Not only does He not wipe out all the sinners, but also, He doesn’t realize that His attempt to wipe out sin will fail.
  • We’re the ones being taught a theological lesson here – God already knows it, and is teaching us through the Bible. The lesson is this: you can’t wipe sin from the world by wiping out sinners. Each of us has the capacity to sin, and each of us must make the personal decision whether to sin or not.
Once you see that this is the lesson of the story, the question “was it a literal global flood?” becomes moot… 😉
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First off, or course Jesus referencing the story as historical means that Noah and Jonah are historical persons. Jesus was the Author.

OTOH, Jesus references Noah’s days in a collective way, without revealing whether the entire earth and the entirety of humanity were involved.

He was talking about it while in the Land. It was like me referencing the great flood of 1913, while standing in any town in its path. The 1913 Flood covered a huge area, it came almost without warning on a dark night, and some were taken and some remained alive. But it was not worldwide.

Again, I do not insist on the point. It could have been worldwide, or it could have happened when humanity was still living in only a few parts of the world. But the Holy Land, and the humans intimately concerned with it, are most of the concern of the book. Not out of ignorance, but for the sake of the topic of covenant/salvation history.
 
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I have some difficulty accepting your first part. Most likely my misunderstanding. But when one speaks of the perspective of the writer of the book of the Bible, I feel it leads one into a dangerous place theologically. The scripture is the words given to us by God, as recognized by the Church. As such, it is God’s perspective here that matters, not the writer’s.

That said, I appreciate the second part, and it has helped clear up the lesson of the flood. The removal of the sinner does not remove the sin. That is a powerful statement that I will have to reflect on. Thank you.
 
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