Posted on 03/19/2004 10:44:41 AM PST by yankeedame
Last Updated: Friday, 19 March, 2004, 11:06 GMT
Did Noah really build an ark?
By Jeremy Bowen
Presenter, Noah's Ark
In the Bible, God tells Noah he has to build an ark and load a pair of every kind of animal before a great flood engulfs the world. It is widely regarded as a myth, but could it actually be true?
The story of Noah and his ark is one which sticks in the minds of children and never gets forgotten.
God warned Noah - the only good man left in a world full of corruption and violence - to prepare for a great flood. With his sons he built a great ark and the animals marched in two by two. By the time the rain started to fall, Noah was ready. The ark was a refuge until the waters went down, leaving Noah and his menagerie high and dry on Mount Ararat.
There are many problems with the story. If the story is taken literally, it would have taken 35 years for Noah and his family to load two of every animal on earth. And a flood that engulfed the Earth would have left a signature for geologists - yet none has been found.
But it is possible to build a much more credible version of the story based on a different reading of the Bible, on ancient Babylonian sources that predate the Book of Genesis, and on archaeology and science.
Broken apart
The traditional shape of Noah's Ark comes from the imaginations of 19th Century artists. It would have been about 450ft long, and experts say it would have broken apart.
Even if such a feat of marine engineering had been possible, there are about 30 million species of animals in the world. For so many creatures, a fleet of enormous arks would have been needed.
Geologists have also proved that there is not enough water in the world to cover all the continents, then or now.
Loading 30 million species of animal would have taken 35 years But just because the details of this familiar story do not add up, should we turn our backs on Noah and the ark?
We have to forget the idea that such a huge boat carrying all known animals existed, that it came to rest on Mount Ararat in modern-day Turkey, and that a flood covered the entire Earth.
In 1851, British archaeologists discovered hundreds of clay tablets while digging in ancient Babylon.
It was 20 years later that British Museum assistant George Smith became the first person to read them. He found the story of Gilgamesh, which bore strong similarities to that of Noah. He was visited by the great gods, who decided there would be a great deluge, told him to make a boat and carry in it the seed of all living things.
Further Iraqi texts were discovered, showing the story emerged in Mesopotamia. And in the 1930s conclusive evidence of a huge flood in the area about 5,000 years ago - the time of the story of Noah - was found.
Trading centres
What we know of the culture of what is now Iraq gives the first glimpse of the real-life historical figure behind the myth.
Noah might have been king of a city called Shuruppak. He would have had a kilt, a shaven head and eye make-up, like the figures portrayed in artworks created in what was then known as Sumeria.
The epic of Gilgamesh says Noah had silver and gold, then the currency of wealthy merchants, suggesting he was a businessman.
Could this story have provided the inspiration for the Book of Genesis 2,000 years later?
Instead of building an ark to survive a great flood, he is more likely to have built boats to trade goods like beer, grain and animals.
All the big trading centres of the era were on the River Euphrates and it was cheaper to move goods by water than land. Sumerians were able to build barges about 20ft in length, and marine archaeologists have not found remains or inscriptions of larger vessels.
But they believe they would have had the technology to have built a series of barges and used them like pontoons on which a much larger boat, or ark, could have been constructed.
Tropical storm
Parts of the Euphrates were only navigable at certain times of the year, when the waters were deep enough for large boats.
Noah was likely to have waited for the melt waters to arrive in June and July and, if these had combined with a tropical storm, the river could have flooded the Mesopotamian plain.
The currents in the area would not have taken him towards Mount Ararat, but out into the Persian Gulf. Life would have been difficult, but they could have survived on the animals and beer on board.
One Babylonian text suggests the ark came to rest on what is now the island of Bahrain, providing a very different yet plausible end to the adventure.
Could this story have provided the inspiration for the holy men who wrote the Book of Genesis 2,000 years later? When they first heard the story, how could they fail to recognise its moral power, that if humankind falls short of God's laws, there's a dreadful price to pay. Behind that moral message lies one of the world's greatest stories.
And behind that story we can just glimpse a real man, a real boat and a real adventure.
I try never to attack anyone for their personal religious beliefs, unless you happen to be a moslem who thinks Allah wants you to kill me. And to the extent I've done that on this thread, I apologize. I should have restricted my comments more to the fact that I used to believe the literal account of Noah's Flood, but no longer do. Nor do I think which side you come down on the issue is particularly important to God. It's an irrelevant side issue to the important things.
How many species were there at the time of Noah? THAT is the question ... not how many there are today. And how many species can be generated from an example of each animal? We would need some kind of canine to make wolves, cocker spaniels, german shepards ...
Bad move. You don't argue FOR the bible by arguing FOR evolution. Well you could, but many here will not appreciate it =)
You tell funny joke!
Creation science continues to twist and turn in order to avoid the data outside the bible.
Then there are the common sense problems with letting out all the animals at Ararat I mentioned earlier. Or the water volume problem. Or the what the heck would people and animals eat except each other when they disembarked problem.
Rather than straining to come up with bizarre explanations for all these problems, I came to the conclusion that it was an allegory.
Greek Flood Myth
Then comes the Greek story of the flood. Bereft of Prometheus' guidance, men and women grew so wicked that Jupiter sent a great flood which destroyed them all, except one good man, Deucalion, a son of Prometheus, and one good woman, Pyrrha, a daughter of Epimetheus. These two were preserved as being fit to live. The flood submerged all earth except Mount Olympus, where the gods lived, and Mount Parnassus, where Deucalion and Pyrrha found shelter. Then the waters withdrew, and from the oracle of Apollo on Parnassus came a voice commanding the two survivors to people the world anew with more worthy inhabitants. They were told to begin by casting behind them "the bones of their mother." Deucalion shrewdly interpreted this strange oracle as referring to the stones, the bones of Mother Earth. So as he and Pyrrha left the oracle, they tossed stones over their shoulders. All that Deucalion threw took form as men, those of Pyrrha became women. She was slighter than Deucalion, and threw smaller stones, so women have ever since been less of stature than men.
The son of Deucalion was that Hellen from whom all the later Greeks claimed descent. Yet it is notable that even in their legends they retain the traces of their divided race. On Hellen's family tree there is a distinct place assigned for each Achaean hero. But the heroes of the older Aegean people are never traced from Hellen. Each one is given independent origin as the child or grandchild of some god. Thus we have a fairly positive way for deciding of each hero in the stories that follow whether he was in truth Achaean or whether the memory of him had been preserved from older non-Achaean days.
Now, what part of this flood myth matches the story in the Bible?
I've often wondered if many of the great extinctions occurred when certain species either didn't board the ark or were not invited to do so.
Second time that's come up today.
Here's the best answer I was able to google up.
How many animal species were onboard the Ark?
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