The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible

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buffalo said:
We do not know that. Recent findings show the Hebrew language is older than we thought.
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First of all, the Hebrew language is a dialect of the Canaanite language (as is Phoenician), so yes, if you count the Canaanite family, that will push it back a ways. As well, the Afro-Asiatic languages (of which Hebrew is a member) is the only language family that linguists have felt comfortable pushing back to around 10,000 years of age, but the original Afro-Asiatic languages would have been as foreign to a first millennia Hebrew as Proto-Germanic would sound to us.

It’s likely that some sort of proto-Canaanite was being spoken when the Sumerians were at their height, but there was no Canaanite writing system until a thousand years after the Sumerians fully developed cuneiform writing. The Gilgamesh story itself is at least a thousand years older than the first postulated written versions of Genesis, which, so far as I can tell, cannot be pushed much further back than the 10th century BCE. Let’s remember that in the 10th century BCE, the Hebrew peoples were either fully polytheistic and at least henotheistic (monotheism didn’t really evolve until during or after the Babylonian Captivity), so it seems much more probable that the Gilgamesh epic would have been adopted somewhere during that period, and then, as with other aspects of the early chapters in Genesis, the Yahwists expunged much of the older poly/henotheistic aspects of the original accounts.

At any rate, whether the Hebrew story is older than the Sumerian myth, the fact is that we have only textual information to go on, and that makes the Gilgamesh cycle at least a thousand years older than the Nohaic story. It’s probably even further back than that, as Gilgamesh was a Sumerian mythical hero, which probably pushes at least aspects of the epic even further back into the proto or pre-literate stages of that civilization’s evolution. That pushes you into the tricky territory of when Semitic peoples first started to arrive in the Levant.
 
niceatheist said:
Neither is the craft described in Genesis
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According to Dr.Grady McMurtry Creation scientist and life member of Mensa, the Ark was approximately 438 ft. length, 73ft. width and 44ft height. The Bible says that the Flood of Noah covered all the mountains of the world to a depth of 22.5 ft.- the exact amount needed for the Ark to float over the highest mountain ( prior to the flood )
The Ark was a vessel for floating. Modern marine architects have determined that the Ark of Noah was the single most stable floating object ever conceived - almost impossible to capsize. His website is Creation Worldview Ministries and one of the topics in the Articles section is Noah’s Ark.
 
Well, here’s the thing. Every culture on Earth has a flood myth. I have a book on North American Indian mythology and legends, I promise you they have them too. Just because something is similar, doesn’t mean it’s the same. It doesn’t mean that one influenced the other. It would have been impossible for people from what we would Now call the Middle East or near East, to Have influenced American Indians at that time. Or vice versa. This is what is called an association fallacy. It’s kind of like the people who say that Christmas is really the birthday of Horus, for one there’s no similarity really there, but they base this off of 19th century amateur egyptology. So be very careful, when you come across things like this, because of someone’s making that connection it’s up to them to offer evidence. And, as I recall, and the Epic of Gilgamesh and I might be wrong the Earth was flooded because the gods were trying to sleep. I don’t remember that in Genesis.
 
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Carmel said:
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niceatheist:
Neither is the craft described in Genesis
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According to Dr.Grady McMurtry Creation scientist and life member of Mensa, the Ark was approximately 438 ft. length, 73ft. width and 44ft height. The Bible says that the Flood of Noah covered all the mountains of the world to a depth of 22.5 ft.- the exact amount needed for the Ark to float over the highest mountain ( prior to the flood )
The Ark was a vessel for floating. Modern marine architects have determined that the Ark of Noah was the single most stable floating object ever conceived - almost impossible to capsize. His website is Creation Worldview Ministries and one of the topics in the Articles section is Noah’s Ark.
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That’s one heck of a fallacious appeal to authority. First of all, there’s no such thing as a “Creation scientist”. That’s like calling an astrologer a scientist. Second of all, what does Mensa have to do with anything. Where’s his expertise in maritime engiineering. Third, the ark could float, but I know of no engineer that thinks such a large wooden structure would remain stable in any kind of current. Even the largest wooden craft built towards the end of the end of that kind of shipbuilding actually had significant steel reinforcement, because the stresses of actual sailing would have torn the ships apart.
 
niceatheist said:
. First of all, there’s no such thing as a “Creation scientist”. That’s like calling an astrologer a scientist.
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Science is used to attempt to discredit the Biblical narrative, so obviously science will be used to verify (or prove ) the Biblical narrative.
To compare the Creation account with astrology is just plain ignorant
 
Carmel said:
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niceatheist:
. First of all, there’s no such thing as a “Creation scientist”. That’s like calling an astrologer a scientist.
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Science is used to attempt to discredit the Biblical narrative, so obviously science will be used to verify (or prove ) the Biblical narrative.
To compare the Creation account with astrology is just plain ignorant
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And when you can show me some actual science that shows that a wooden boat the size of the ark could survive intact for 40 days and nights, you let me know.

And yes, a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is no different than astrology.
 
Even accounting for the possible loss of technology due to the Flood, early post-Flood civilisations display all the engineering knowhow necessary for a project like Noah’s Ark.
P:eople sawing and drilling wood in Noah’s day only a few centuries before the Egyptians were sawing and drilling granite, is very reasonable. The idea that more primitive civilisations are further back in time is an evolutionary idea.
When God created Adam, he was perfect. Today, the individual human intellect has suffered from 6000 years of sin and decay. The computer compensates a great deal for our natural decline in mental performance and discipline, since it permits us to gather and store information as perhaps, never before.😎
 
niceatheist said:
And when you can show me some actual science that shows that a wooden boat the size of the ark could survive intact for 40 days and nights, you let me know.
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What good would that do? Let me get this straight:
  1. If I can’t scientifically prove the ark was seaworthy, then it’s a myth and there is no God.
  2. If I can scientifically prove the ark is seaworthy, then the ark is a rational product of man’s technical ingenuity, therefore, there is no God.
    Lose-lose. Why do you even bother to ask?
 
Scale models of the Ark have been built. They are seaworthy and suited for rough waves. The CIA has an aerial photo titled “Ararat Anomaly.” Mt. Ararat is in Turkey, and the Turkish government has strong restrictions in place for those wishing to climb up the mountain due to security concerns.
 
If there was a historical Great Flood and a historical Garden of Eden, one would expect that more than one culture would remember it. Sumer, Babylon, Phoenicia, and Egypt wers all close neighbors to Israel, so their peoples would be more likely to preserve fragments of salvation history. Traditionally, this has been a point that Jews and Christians could actually use in apologetics.

Similarly, any moral instruction held in common by pagans and the Bible was a demonstration of God’s grace to all peoples, the power of the Holy Spirit to teach truth, and a wonderful preparation for the spread of the Gospel.

Nowadays, however, a lot of people think that anything in the Bible that shares “pagan cooties” must be pagan. Others think that all religious stories are fiction, and that therefore the Epic of Gilgamesh gives the Bible “fiction cooties.”

The cooties idea doesn’t make much sense, but I suppose it is something one must take into account for argument’s sake.
 
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edwest211 said:
Scale models of the Ark have been built. They are seaworthy and suited for rough waves. The CIA has an aerial photo titled “Ararat Anomaly.” Mt. Ararat is in Turkey, and the Turkish government has strong restrictions in place for those wishing to climb up the mountain due to security concerns.
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I’m sorry, it just isn’t possible to make that large a wooden vessel seaworthy. Even with steel reinforcement, the last generation of large wooden ships had so much flex that they pretty much had to have pumps running constantly. And those ships were still a lot smaller than the ark.

And no, there’s no ark on Ararat.
 
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Can you tell us which Church authorities support his personal interpretation of Genesis?
 
buffalo said:
Could Noah’s Ark Float? In Theory, Yes

“You don’t think of the Bible necessarily as a scientifically accurate source of information, so I guess we were quite surprised when we discovered it would work,” said Thomas Morris, one of the students who worked on the project, in a statement
Read more: Could Noah’s Ark Float? In Theory, Yes | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
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Floating is one thing. Maintaining structural integrity on open water is another. Even just floating, there would be so much stress on the hull that you would have to an army of people on pumps all the time. YOu just can’t build wooden vessels that big.
 
The Chinese did more than float them. If you would watch, it will show how they maintained structural integrity.
 
twf said:
Can you tell us which Church authorities support his personal interpretation of Genesis?
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Dr. McMurtry is a scientist. I don’t think he has applied to the Catholic Church for an imprimatur.
 
And some of the reports of the larger size of some of these ships has been contested as well, for precisely the same reason. So far as I understand it, the current theory is that if the largest of these ships was actually ever built, it was for show, again because wooden vessels of such extraordinary size would have significant structural issues, particularly in even normal seagoing conditions.

To put this in perspective, some of the largest wooden sailing ships ever built, like the Wyoming built in 1909, had huge problems with flexing, which meant seawater was constantly getting into the hold, and required near constant pumping. The other important fact about the Wyoming and the similar ships built at the end of the age of sail was that they had steel reinforcement, because without it, the hulls would have collapsed.

So we have some questionable reports of giant Chinese ships, that if they existed, never actually sailed in the proper sense of the word, and we have the largest wooden sailing ships we can verify, who required steel reinforcement to retain structural integrity, and still leaked like sieves because of the flexing of the long planks they were built of.

I’m afraid ships of the Ark’s dimensions that could actually be considered seaworthy had to wait until we started building ships out of steel, because even if he had managed to get the Ark to float, it would either have collapsed due to structural issues, or would have taken on water like crazy, requiring a pretty elaborate pumping system, what with only eight people to operate it, and so would have been swamped and sunk.
 
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