True

In the interest of logic, something religion is very uncomfortable with....

Woudnt the carnivorous animals be eating all of the herbivores on board of the Ark? Were these animals loose? They had to be taken out for exercise if they were caged What about elephants? Were there elephants on board the Ark? Where would they have gotten elephants from exactly? Wouldn't the animals only native to the Middle East have been available for them to collect? Were there giraffes? What about armadillos and sloths? Who would even bother with a boy and girl sloth?

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/set/1478/sloth20052small.jpg

Apart from the internal problems with the story, there is another kind of evidence that tells us the source of this biblical story of the worldwide deluge. In the middle of the nineteenth century an excavation on the banks of the River Tigris, archaeologists unearthed twelve clay tablets which were written in the then mysterious cuneiform script. Then around the turn of the twentieth century, archaeologists finally managed to decipher the script. They discovered that it was written in Akkadian, the language of ancient royalty and diplomacy. The tablets tell of the story of Gilgamesh.

What interest us here is the story told on the eleventh tablet. In this tablet we are told that Gilgamesh, in his quest for immortality set out on a long journey to look for his ancestor, Utnapishtim. Utnapishtim was already bestowed with eternal life by the gods. Upon reaching the island of Utnapishtim’s abode, Gilgamesh was told a story by his ancestor of a great flood that once swept the world. The similarity between this story and that of Genesis is astounding. The table at bottom gives a comparison of both these stories.

The point by point correspondence revealed by table 4.3 is astounding:


The method of destroying all living things of the world was with a great worldwide flood
There was a single person singled out by the gods to be saved.
This person was commanded to build a massive ark or ship.
The ark is to house him, his kinfolk and all kinds of beasts.
After the flood receded, the ark came to rest on a mountain.
Both arks have windows which were opened after the rain had subsided.
A bird was released from the ark once it came to rest on the mountain.
The obvious similarities could not have been, not by any stretch of imagination, due to coincidence. One of the account is clearly dependent on the other. So the question is, which is the original and which is the copy? There are many reasons to believe that the Babylonian version is the original:


The first is antiquity. The writing of the epic of Gilgamesh has been dated by archaeologists to around 2000 BCE. Thus it predates the Genesis account by at least a few centuries.
The second is the presence of loan words. The Akkadian word for pitch (or bitumen): kofer. This is precisely the word used in the Genesis story. Nowhere else in the Bible does the word kofer appears except in the story of the flood.
The third is the general flow of influence. We would expect the greater civilization to have a greater cultural influence on a lesser one. Compared to Babylonia, Israel was, as Cyrus Gordon said, a "backwater of sorts".
The fourth reason is from the original source of the myth. Floods are common in the Mesopotamian plains, it is unusual in usually arid Israel. It is easy to see how the flood myth could have originated from some stories told in the Babylonian plains, it is not so easy to see how anyone from Israel could have thought of that myth originally.
Finally, the location of the story gives a clue to its origins. The geography of the ark story points towards its Mesopotamian origin. Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat, which is at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates.
It is therefore conclusive that the story in Genesis is a direct descendent of the Babylonian story.

The Akkadian tablets, like the story in Genesis, are collections of myths. There was, however, a brief period of respectability, in the first half of the twentieth century, given to the notion of the occurrence of an actual catastrophic flood. An archaeological expedition in 1929 led by Sir Charles Leonard Wooley (1880-1960) found at the site of the ancient city of Ur, a stratum of clean clay about eight feet thick. Wooley originally estimated the layer of silt to be about four hundred miles long and about one hundred miles wide. The layer was dated at around 4000BC. Had this been true, a flood of such a magnitude would certainly has qualified as "world-wide" to the ancient Babylonians, for the area estimated by Wooley represented the whole of the known world to them. However, subsequent expeditions has shown that the thick layer of silt is localized and was nowhere as widespread as Wooley first thought it to be.



Was Noah actually a historical person? Again archaeological evidence supplied the answer. In 1933 clay tablets were discovered in Mari, an ancient city in the Mesopotamian plain. In these tablets (there were about 20,000 discovered), the name Noah appeared many times; as the name of a god. In fact Noah’s name is actually a musculanisation of the goddess of rain, Nuah.

Notes

a. The story of the twelve tablets were estimated to have been written about 2000 BCE. Even assuming "best case" biblical chronology, i.e. that Genesis was written by Moses himself, this brings the writing of Genesis to only about 1400 BCE. Thus the Akkadian tablet is earlier than the Genesis story. According to critical theologians, the earliest form of the Hebrew flood story was written only around 900 BCE. But the version as we have it in the Bible was not complete until the period of the exile c. 6th century BCE.
b. The flood story is a myth, of course, as I have shown earlier.

Yep, Seamonster its not only the Ark story that was plagerized but also The Tree of Knowledge. Here is that. Also a Sumerian king has a suspisciously similar beginnig as a certain Moses character. Both were floated down rivers in baskets to be saved by Princesses. The bible is a rip off!

Look here:

ENKI AND NINHURSAG
How Enki surrendered to the Earth Mother and Queen

‘Enki and Ninhursag’ is perhaps one of the most difficult Mesopotamian myth for Judeo-Christian Westerners to understand, because it stands as the opposite of the myth of Adam and Eve in Paradise found in the Old Testament Bible. Indeed, ‘ the literature created by the Sumerians left its deep imprint on the Hebrews, and one of the thrilling aspects of reconstructing and translating Sumerian belles-lettres consists in tracing resemblances and parallels between Sumerian and Biblical motifs.

To be sure, Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land later known as Palestine’. Some comparisons with the Bible paradise story: 1) the idea of a divine paradise, the garden of gods, is of Sumerian origin, and it was Dilmun, the land of immortals situated in southwestern Persia. It is the same Dilmun that, later, the Babylonians, the Semitic people who conquered the Sumerians, located their home of the immortals. There is a good indication that the Biblical paradise, which is described as a garden planted eastward in Eden, from whose waters flow the four world rivers including the Tigris and the Euphrates, may have been originally identical with Dilmun;

2) the watering of Dilmun by Enki and the Sun god Utu with fresh water brought up from the earth is suggestive of the Biblical ‘ But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’ (Genesis 2:6);

3) the birth of goddesses without pain or travail illuminates the background of the curse against Eve that it shall be her lot to conceive and bear children in sorrow;

4) Enki’s greed to eat the eight sacred plants which gave birth to the Vegetal World resonates the eating of the Forbidden Fruit by Adam and Eve, and

5) most remarkably, this myth provides an explanation for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story - the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, the mother of all living, from the rib of Adam. Why a rib instead of another organ to fashion the woman whose name Eve means according to the Bible, ‘she who makes live’? If we look at the Sumerian myth, we see that when Enki gets ill, cursed by Ninhursag, one of his body parts that start dying is the rib. The Sumerian word for rib is ‘ti’ . To heal each o Enki’s dying body parts, Ninhursag gives birth to eight goddesses. The goddess created for the healing of Enki’s rib is called ‘Nin-ti’, ‘the lady of the rib’. But the Sumerian word ‘ti’ also means ‘to make live’. The name ‘Nin-ti’ may therefore mean ‘the lady who makes live’ as well as ‘the lady of the rib’. Thus, a very ancient literary pun was carried over and perpetuated in the Bible, but without its original meaning, because the Hebrew word for ‘rib’ and that for ‘who makes live’ have nothing in common. Moreover, it is Ninhursag who gives her life essence to heal Enki, who is then reborn from her

Right, In fact with closer examination you can find a great deal of stories in the bible that have just been plagiarized by earlier writings.

" In human's imagination, all things are possible."

Yep probably. The Sumerian is pretty remarkable but there might be others as well. You can trace the line back to the Semitic peoples that conquered them.

Two quotes from an Evangelical geologist, Davis Young:


People of Faith can't be troubled with the science of things like the vapour canopy. And that's the problem with Biblical inerrancy-- according to their own conditions, they have to have a scientific and independently verifiable answer to a LOT of difficult questions. And they have to get them ALL correct or the myth fails its own conditions.

-Kerry O.

If you fictionalized something in your own head than you can create whatever conditions you want. Thats what seems to be taking place here so its silly to even attempt to present reliable scientific evidence to support the impossibility of their claims because you are up against god and they will continually claim that "god can do it."

By chronology of Genesis. Noah entered the Ark in 2300 bce.

Also The ark landed on the Mountain range of Arafat not Arafat Mountain.

Are you all trying to save us from ourselves? You put alot of effort into trying to prove the Bible as a myth. Alot more than I ever thought about putting into Darwism. That is a Myth but I could care less about putting all my energy into disproving it. Why would I care who believes Darwin? Blows my mind trying to disprove something you are convinced is a lie. Was religion shoved down your throat at a earlier age so now you are going to get even and shove back? Just curious why. Shalom...Miles

Im not sure who you are directing that absurd accusation at but I see no problem with questioning something? What do you think scientists do for a living? They question previously made assumptions and either prove them to be fact based or inaccurate based on study, test and research and finally conclusion.

Are you saying that no one is allowed to question the bible?

How many people have been killed in the name of Darwin?
Now, how many people have been killed in the name of god.
If the world is rid of these fairy tales that kill, and I helped in even a small way then yes it's worth it.

no I have always welcomed questioning the bible. Thats not a problem and i was directing it at anyone who spends alot of time trying to disprove it.

Now science something tangible like that takes alot of time and research to present a different theory to any point of view you may disagree with.

But what I continually here is it is a myth it can not possibly be true.

So to me a myth is a myth thats it. If you want to believe it go for it.

That is a lot different than something you can do DNA testing and all kinds of physical stuff to come to a scientific conclusion. I am glad we have scientists who constantly try to figure stuff out. Helps all of us.

But to be Blunt I believe you all are trying real hard to convince yourself this is really a myth and you wrestle with it. So you use us as a guine pig to try to prove it to yourself because a forum gets lots of different idea's that you may not of thought of to study to try to prove to yourself this really is a myth. IMO..Shalom...Miles


PS. Just being truthful how i see it

The majority of the stories in the bible are impossible, so what's one more.

This is a fruitless exercise and the believers will blindly believe and the non-believers will continue to question and not believe.

The world according to the minute number of human beings living in the "middle east" may have been covered with a flood.

Around that time there was a huge volcanic explosion in Santorini (Greece) and the Minoan civilisation was wiped out 1500BCE.

There is nothing to indicate that it isnt a myth Miles. All the bible is is the Christan Creation Mythology and it is no more or less credible than any other Creation mythology professed by any other people throughout the world. For you to favor one over the other is silly in my opinion. Explain to me how the Christian conceptualization of the origins of man (or anything else it claims) is somehow more accurate than any other religion's view of it?

It really does not matter in religious theology the thought of anyones being better. Because that believes because that has no bearing on us now other than the Sabbath. Then of course it is taken up in the 10 commandments.

But that was not my point of my comments of why a myth to the unbeliever must be proved wrong with such passion. I believe you will see that if you reread my post. Shalom..Miles

Well my opinion is that the bible is a collection of legends, mythology and fictitious stories (which may or may not have some factual accounts mixed in). Im not ruling that out of course. I would argue with you vehemently its merit as a "divinely inspired" manuscript. Absolutely. There are far too many errors, inconsistencies, outlandish claims and contradictions for it to be anything other than the words of some such human men. You can argue that all you want. It wont convince me otherwise, just like anything we show you wont change your mind. It does not matter how fact based or credible our information is. Im fully aware of that.

The problem comes in that humans have been murdering humans in the name of this ridiculous manuscript for CENTURIES. Women killed as Witches, men killed as magicians, all this nonsense about "no gods before me". Its so totally dangerous and agenda driven that I cant help but have a visceral reaction to it. Especially as a non-Christian female.

I do not disagree what so called believers have done in the past in the name of the cross. that is but one reason why i dispise the cross and will have nothing to do with it.

It was an instrument of death that Killed the messiah and it continued as an instument of death untill recent history.

We do not though believe or most at least. That John Doe is less of a person or has less rights because his great great great grandfather was a slave owner. we have progressed past that.

Religion has progressed also. Thier maybe some countries in the world that use the Holy Scriptures as a reason for killing . I am not sure. But they are wrong.

Our own country has went through stepping stones and made many mistakes along the way and are progressing back to a system of classes.

Which men used for ever it seems to decide who is more worthy.

So I disagree with using anything our forefathers may of done as a reason to say the believer believes hypocrasy.

We must be given the benefit of doubt that we are not our forefathers that killed and ruled with a iron thumb.. We are not responcible for that history. No matter how true it is. Blessings...Miles

ok, but your god is.
If a "god" puts out a book that tells people about him and what he wants you would think it would be in both his and our best intrest for it to be a book that can not be subject to interpitation.
And yet there are many many diffrent branches of christianity. And all claim to be the right one with the right interpitation.
So I say that anyone killed in the name of said god, the blood is on the hands of this god, for purposely giving us a book that he knew would divide us. Becouse being god he could have writen it in a way that it would not but he refused to.
So either this god does not realy exist and we are fighting over a book that means nothing, or your god is an assh*le.

When religious fundamentalist stop trying to do things like get public money to perpetuate these myths in violation of the Establishment claus of the U.S. Constituion, I'll stop passionately arguing the case against these myths on their merits.

When the Mormons stop sending money all over the U.S. to prevent a group of people domonized by Biblical myth all over the country from choosing with whom to spend their betrothed lives, I'll be glad to stop making the arguments to unmask the unsound 'logic' behind them.


When militant Christians stop throwing their narcissism about by saying "This is a Christian country, if you don't like it then get out", then I'll stop exposing these myths for the excuses for their covert hostility towards those that don't believe as they do for what they really are.

Until then...


-Kerry O.