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Q6: What About the Flood Myths and Histories
It is by now well known to
scoffers and creationists alike that there are literally hundreds of
myths and legends about a great flood, the vast majority of which are
told as being universal or worldwide, contrary to the claims of those
uninformed scoffers who have not done the research nor actually read
the source documents.
The following is a breakdown of the aspects of the flood found in the
flood myths and legends.
STATISTICAL BREAKDOWN OF FLOOD
TRADITIONS
1. Is there a favored
family?..........................................................88%
2. Is there a
remnant?.....................................................................12%
3. Is survival due to a
boat?............................................................70%
4. Is survival due to other means?
.................................................30%
5. Is catastrophe only a flood?
.......................................................95%
6. Is flood connected with other events?
.......................................5%
7. Is flood due to wickedness of man?
...........................................66%
8. Is flood due to natural causes?
...................................................34%
9. Were animals also saved?
..........................................................67%
10. Did animals play any part?
.........................................................73%
11. Was flood universal?
..................................................................95%
12. Did the survivors eventually end up on a mountain?
.................57%
13. Were birds sent out?
...................................................................35%
14. Was the rainbow mentioned?
.....................................................7%
15. Did survivors sacrifice, etc., afterwards?
...................................13%
16. Were the favored ones or remnant forewarned?
.........................66%
17. Was the geography local? (Local mountain?)
............................82%
18. Were specifically eight persons saved?
......................................9%
19. Were there incidental circumstances?
........................................37%
There have been over 200 legends collected from around the world, some
saying closer now to 300. It is startling to note the remarkable
similarity to the Genesis story among them. Scoffers are always quick
to point out that a fair amount of them are local in geography but
universal in terms of killing an entire group or clan of people. But
they overlook some things.
The first thing they tend to overlook is the perspective of the era in
which they were recorded. These were people who has a distinctly narrow
view of what the world was. To a clan member in the primitive state the
flood would have left humanity would not regard the world to be the
entire globe, but merely the valley in which they might have settled.
Noah, however, having lived in the preflood world, would have known of
at least a much larger area that constituted the world (how much could
people who live to be 900 discover in 1656 years?) and at the most
would have known about all of it. Secondly he floated over it for a
year and never found any exposed areas until he settled in Ararat, so
he knew about the global nature of the flood. The later descendents did
not. They also had (as all cultures do) severe cases of ethnocentrism,
or the belief that their culture or clan was better than the others.
Thus, when they were telling the flood stories, they probably tried to
interprete them in ways that they could understand based upon their
limited knowledge of the surrounding world.
Because the flood was experienced by the founders of the three strands
of humanity, Ham (Hamitic), Shem (Semitic people), and Japheth
(Indo-European), the flood legends passed down directly to their
descendents. Each clan would have regarded themselves as the true
original survivor strand from which all others sprang and adapted it to
fit this view, thus they would perceive that god(s) killed humanity but
saved some people to start over, who then repopulated the area and
would see themselves as the original strand from which all others
sprung. Thus they would believe that the flood would have killed off
their people if they saw themselves as part of the pre-flood line.
Thus it is possible to see how the locality yet universality of the
flood could have developed.
Some scoffers have proposed that the flood legends resulted because
early civilization settled near rivers that seasonally flood. This is
utter nonsense. If the flooding were as bad as described in the flood
legends then the entire civilization would be consistantly wiped out,
with the survivors living in a boat, settling down in a mountainous
region and returning to the same spot and rebuilding, only to have it
repeat again the next year.
If this were the case, not only would humanity be stupid and extremely
forgetful, but would never have technologically progressed due to being
constantly destroyed and starting over.
However, it is patently obvious that this was not the case. Indeed,
local river flooding is perfectly survivably, even by people living
near to the river. River floods are hardly unusual nor generally
catastrophic in the way that a world-wide flood would be. The Ohio
river rises every spring, often times rising ten or so feet and the
Ohioans do not run around shouting “the whole world’s flooding, man!
It’s a judgement of God!”
River floods certainly would not be worthy of centuries of telling and
retelling, particularly given that these early civilizations often soon
developed ways to use the flooding to their advantage, with irrigation
and such.
Another interesting aspect of this is that so many civilizations and
cultures have legends that their people were wiped out so completely
and so consistantly that it appears like every single culture has
experienced a catastrophic flood event that occured similarly and with
similar actions on the part of the survivors and events outside of
their control, like landing in a mountain range. If they all have
experienced floods of similar scale and similar in line of events, it
is not unreasonable to infer that they all are recording a singular
event which destroyed all of humanity aside from some few survivors and
covered the world.
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