Lemme try this on you guys and see what you think.
In Noah's time, there weren't many people on earth at all. And they all lived close together along the Euphrates River close to where life started. Irrigation was no problem. Family was close. You get the picture.
Noah was a smart guy. Watched nature all the time since there wasn't any TV yet. Kept a close eye on things. Noticed that the river went up and down with the seasons. Some seasons more than others. After decades of watching the river, he noticed a culminating series of events that seemed to presage an unnaturally high river stage on its way the coming spring. We do that now with the Mississippi River, and other rivers too, don't we? We know way in advance when it's going to come out of its banks.
Noah sees the signs. He knows the river the coming Spring is going to come way high. So Noah builds a big barge on which to put his family and his livestock. His friends and neighbors, who aren't into studying river dynamics, laugh at him. People always do laugh at stuff they don't understand. Noah is undaunted.
Spring comes. The river rises. And when it gets close to coming out of its banks, Noah puts his family on the barge and waits until the river goes down. Lots of people are killed in the flood. But not everyone. People talk. They did. And just like the child's game where a sentence is whispered to the first kid in a line to be passed on down to the last kid - where it doesn't even resemble the original, the story of Noah grew and grew and grew.
Now the WT says that there's a flood story in every society on earth. Even among those who live in deserts. Well, if everyone at Noah's time lived near the river, it does make sense that when they migrated all over the earth, they took their flood story with them. (Duh.)
So we can see that there's a simple explanation for the story of Noah. And the story gets God off the hook as a mass murderer. We make a big mistake when we swallow all these fanciful stories evolved out of human nature and the arrogance of Jewish secular history all tricked out as some revelation of God's relationship with his so-called chosen people.
How'd I do?
Francois
