by LouBelle 17 Replies latest jw friends
From all that I read, I believe there was a Noah. His name was Unapishitim. He is in the
Epic of Gilgamesh.
I also suspect there was a flood, there is evidence for it.
But it depends on what you want to see.
Start out reading the 12th planet by Zechariah sitchin.
Whether I believe it or not, is not going to change my life today.
And today is all I have.
I'll give Noah 60% probability.
I think the whole early part of the Bible is myth and legend. Just read Genesis with a critical eye and it's full of stuff that doesn't make sense. Read the two different creation accounts. Men living hundreds of years, but not having children until they're several decades old? How many of each kind of bird did Noah take on the ark? 7 or 2, because it depends on which verse you read. Was light never reflected by particles of water so as to form a color spectrum (rainbow) prior to the end of the flood?
How can you take anything like that literally?
OK, maybe there was a flood. But the chances of it being global are slim to none. Flooding happens. It happened around the Mississippi River a few years ago, New Orleans flooded.
So with all the other tall tales in Genesis, do you really think some guy had several years advanced notice to build an ark, then all of the animals flocked together to be saved?
The story as told doesn't make sense. God wants to destroy mankind. He's so ready to wipe out man, yet he decides to wait for an almost 600-year-old man to build a huge boat without the benefit of modern tools. Think of all the time Noah spent. And then think of all the miracles that had to happen to get the animals over to Noah. And if it was a global flood, to keep the fish alive when the water salination changes as fresh and salt water mix. And then to keep the animals from eating each other. To keep them alive on the ark. To get them back to places like Australia. To get them to repopulate, etc. Wouldn't it have been much easier and quicker if God had sent his "angel of death" like he did to the firstborn of the Egyptians? And one of the things God was fed up with was the violence of mankind, yet he decides to kill everything not on the ark?
But who knows? There could have been a guy named Noah. Sure. Why not? If Noah was a Jewish name, somebody with that name maybe existed. Maybe he even lived in a coastal town, owned a boat, and used it to save people during a local flood. But I think he's more of a Paul Bunyan type.
Noah is a slippery character- historical or just a legend? It seems unlikely that oral traditions could pass down an accurate record of Noah, if he did exist. Jews for the most part don't take the flood story literally. I know my Rabbi's don't believe that Noah's flood was real, but that belief doesn't change a Jew into to a non-Jew. However, Christians are in a bind when it comes to Noah's flood story. I explained to a JW recently some scientific reasons why the flood couldn't have happened. He listened and nodded that he understood my arguments ( which were all new to him) and then he surprised me. He said, "if you're right, that makes Jesus a liar, since he believed in the flood of Noah" . He then realized what he had just said and quickly turned off his critcal thinking brain skills and got in his car and drove off in search of someone he could convince that his notion of truth was the real truth and in so doing give validity to his patheic existence as a slave of the Watchtower publishing corporation. Truth has been said to be only what you convince others it is.
Noah is just someone who had the foresight to chuck his pigs and chickens into his fishing boat when he saw a storm coming.
The story was embellished a few times before it became the epic of Gilgamesh/Noah.
It's enough to make me wonder if any of the Bible characters in Genesis, before Abraham, were in fact fake. Adam and Eve were likely fictitious characters--there is no way sin could have infested the whole human race through one couple unless God wanted to enslave all mankind. Cain and Abel likewise were more likely than not fictitious characters. As for Seth, the only one I know of with that name was an infrequent visitor of my former congregation and created more bad luck for me than all the Ouija boards, fortune tellers, satanic records, seances, black cats, ladder walks-unders, broken mirrors, Friday the 13ths, and haunted articles (real or threatened) combined would ever have done. The Bible character, where we all came from that source, is probably a complete hoax.
Once we get past Noah, it does become more credible (though still not perfect). Nimrod represents the kind of person that, had he lived around Jesus' time or today, would have been murdered and set up as a Savior some 400 years later. From about Abraham up, they could well have represented real people, albeit not a unique genealogy. For sure, many of the events from that time on were nothing more than hallucinations.
Just one more reason to be a monk--I sure wouldn't want to live with the effects of having spread these lies by wasting all my sex drive writing up such fictitious stories and passing them off as real.
I can't believe i ever accepted the flood story as fact, even though i haven't believed it since i was about 18, it still troubles me to think i was ever taken in by it.
It would not surprise me if he didn't.
Isaac
Yes he did, in a "spiritual way", .....(the idea???),..to scare the HELL (pun intended) out of NON-BELIEVERS,...TO MAKE SURE THEY TOW THE LINE OR ELSE THEY WILL ALSO BE DESTROYED.
african GB member
