Noah and the Flood

I have written a little about Noah. I believe the story is true. The problem of credibility for some I think arises in the indeterminacy of translation-not just language meanings but referent objects and the context in which the story was conveyed from what was essentially near pre-history unto the written language.

Rosenberg wrote a good book named 'Abraham; The First Historical Biography' that would convey some idea of the complexities of the flood story and the way it made it into the book of Genesis.

Assuredly the flood story of Gilgamesh and Noah are similar. They seem to refer to some kind of a Mesopotamian flood in the late Pleistocene when the Persian Gulf sea level was 200 feet lower than today. You may not know that Ararat where the Ark came down was transliterated by ancient Jews from the word Urartu-a defunct nation on the east side of the Euphrates River-a reasonable place for a boat to come to rest after a storm and tidal surge.

The first human civilization or proto-civilization may have been on along the Persian Gulf littoral where people had gathered walking over across the lower Red Sea from Africa long ago. With the rising sea level at the end of the Wisconsin Ice age a starter mud-brick built city may have suddenly flooded when a river berm or natural diking system gave way.

In some parts of the Bible the word 'Earth' is a synonym for dirt. In ancient cultures the entire world was sometimes defined as the distance a man could walk in three days. If all of the dirt (Adamas in Arabic I think) was suddenly flooded yet Noah was prepared it would have been a cataclysmic event when the entire civilization was wiped out. The sons of Noah had someplace to go you might recall, after the flood that is.

There are numerous theoretical contexts that may be made by reasonable people to account for the flood story and of Noah-too many for me to write about here.