invictus said:

[T]he origins of the Noah's Ark myth

itself might less be a matter of historical remembrance (i.e. bequeathal) but a matter of adopting ancient-oriental flood myths.

[T]he flood story in Genesis were mainly written [...] circa 848 BCE to 722 BCE [..., respectively] sometime before 587 BCE.
COMPARISON OF BABYLONIAN AND NOAHIC FLOOD STORIES

The oldest known copy of the epic of Atrahasis can be dated by colophon (scribal identification) to the reign of Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646–1626 BCE), but various Old Babylonian fragments exist; it continued to be copied into the first ...

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invictus said:

[T]he origins of the Noah's Ark myth

itself might less be a matter of historical remembrance (i.e. bequeathal) but a matter of adopting ancient-oriental flood myths.

[T]he flood story in Genesis were mainly written [...] circa 848 BCE to 722 BCE [..., respectively] sometime before 587 BCE.
COMPARISON OF BABYLONIAN AND NOAHIC FLOOD STORIES

The oldest known copy of the epic of Atrahasis can be dated by colophon (scribal identification) to the reign of Hammurabi's great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646–1626 BCE), but various Old Babylonian fragments exist; it continued to be copied into the first millennium.
Atra-Hasis - Wikipedia

The earliest Sumerian versions of the [Gilgamesh] epic date from as early as the Third dynasty of Ur (2100 BC-2000 BC).
Gilgamesh flood myth - Wikipedia

We ought to break ourselves of the Biblicists' tunnel view. The Bible is an important and rich scripture, but it is neither the origin nor the center of the kingdom of literature.
The historicity of biblical myths (the "The-Bible-is-historically-right" paradigm) is - methinks - irrelevant, namely considering the (biblical) belief as well as considering the knowledge of history as well as considering the appreciation of literature.

Some important points:

1. Per comment above, Moses wrote Genesis around 1800 B.C., long after the fact. But the Babylonian myth is fragmented and oral and hieroglyphic fable telling based upon the historic fact of the universal Deluge. Hebrew was the **first written language** , and written account of the event. The long life span (recorded in biblical genealogies) of Noah and his sons, et al, provided the means of retaining credible history since eye-witness accounts are more easily preserved, and accurate, through their children. The Genesis account reads like Noah's log book, as if a captain of a ship, providing detail no one else could possibly have.

2. Every ancient culture ha...

Some important points:

1. Per comment above, Moses wrote Genesis around 1800 B.C., long after the fact. But the Babylonian myth is fragmented and oral and hieroglyphic fable telling based upon the historic fact of the universal Deluge. Hebrew was the **first written language** , and written account of the event. The long life span (recorded in biblical genealogies) of Noah and his sons, et al, provided the means of retaining credible history since eye-witness accounts are more easily preserved, and accurate, through their children. The Genesis account reads like Noah's log book, as if a captain of a ship, providing detail no one else could possibly have.

2. Every ancient culture has a flood story, largely distorted myth, their having no written language or credible communicants of the original. Their distorted accounts, however, do provide prima facia evidence that no one can refute--i.e. that there was a universal flood, reported by all tribes, nations, that deluged the world, leaving only one family as progenitors. Also, every ancient culture has a "day of the dead" (e.g. Halloween) around the end of October, which corresponds to the probable month and time of the Flood.

3. Radio carbon dating and the "millions of years" theories of the earth are based upon the faulty premise of uniformitarianism--i.e. that all things examined in the earth took place at the same rate of time in layers. But the universal flood was a global cataclysmic event which destroyed and then laid down layers of sediment (the Flood was 2 years in duration, but effects continued long after) in a brief span which radio carbon dating assumes took "millions of years". The age of the earth is young, and geologists up until the 1950s validated the universal Flood.

The "Ice Age" is a cover story that does not hold water. Only the flood could have produced coal (mineralized plant matter) and petroleum (mineralized animal/human matter) now used for fuel.

ratilfar said:

Ok....

OK? Really??

blueridge said:

Moses wrote Genesis

Actually, did he? Moses, the writer, huh? Moses, the reporter? Moses, the secretary of JHWH? Maybe "the Torah was created 974 generations (2,000 years) before the world was created"? Maybe, "it is the blueprint that God used to create the world", and "everything created in this world is for the purpose of carrying out the word of the Torah"? (Torah - Wikipedia)
One can believe that, but does not have to. This belief lacks source-critical foundation and cannot be regarded as a necessary part of...

ratilfar said:

Ok....

OK? Really??

blueridge said:

Moses wrote Genesis

Actually, did he? Moses, the writer, huh? Moses, the reporter? Moses, the secretary of JHWH? Maybe "the Torah was created 974 generations (2,000 years) before the world was created"? Maybe, "it is the blueprint that God used to create the world", and "everything created in this world is for the purpose of carrying out the word of the Torah"? (Torah - Wikipedia)
One can believe that, but does not have to. This belief lacks source-critical foundation and cannot be regarded as a necessary part of the (Judaic, Christian, Islamic) belief in the relevance of the biblical scriptures. (See Genesis, composition - Wikipedia.)

blueridge said:

Hebrew was the **first written language**

Of course, Hebrew was the very language of JHWH, that's why, huh? (Another forgery of history for the sake of religious belief.)

The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 1800 BCE in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had a slight possibility of being inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for upwards of a millennium.
History of writing - Wikipedia
(See also: Hebrew language - Wikipedia.)

blueridge said:

universal flood, [...] only one family as progenitors

Maybe this, the incestuous, inbreeding cradle of humankind, can explain the enduringly dubious state of the latter.

blueridge said:

Only the flood [i.e. that universal deluge] could have produced coal (mineralized plant matter) and petroleum (mineralized animal/human matter) now used for fuel.

Noah as an eye-witness of Paleozoic and Mesozoic processes... How foolish can you be...

It ain't necessarily so.
De t'ings dat yo' li'ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain't necessarily so.

Li'l David was small, but oh my!
He fought big Goliath
Who lay down an' dieth,
Li'l David was small, but oh my!

Wadoo-Zim bam boodle-oo,
Hoodle ah da wa da - Scatty wah.

Yeah! Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale,
Fo' he made his home in
Dat fish's abdomen.
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale.

Li'l Moses was found in a ...

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blueridge said:

Only the flood [i.e. that universal deluge] could have produced coal (mineralized plant matter) and petroleum (mineralized animal/human matter) now used for fuel.

Noah as an eye-witness of Paleozoic and Mesozoic processes... How foolish can you be...

It ain't necessarily so.
De t'ings dat yo' li'ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain't necessarily so.

Li'l David was small, but oh my!
He fought big Goliath
Who lay down an' dieth,
Li'l David was small, but oh my!

Wadoo-Zim bam boodle-oo,
Hoodle ah da wa da - Scatty wah.

Yeah! Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale,
Fo' he made his home in
Dat fish's abdomen.
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale.

Li'l Moses was found in a stream.
He floated on water
Till Ole Pharaoh's daughter
She fished him, she says, from dat stream.

Wa-dooZim bam boodle-oo,
Hoodle ah da wa - Scatty wah.

Yeah! It ain't necessarily so,
It ain't necessarily so,
[...]
Oh, I takes dat gospel
Whenever it's pos'ble,
But wid a grain of salt.

Methus'lah lived nine hundred years,
Say, but who calls dat livin'
When no gal'll give in
To no man what's nine hundred years?

I'm preachin' dis sermon to show
It ain't nessa, ain't nessa, ain't nessa, ain't nessa
Ain't necessarily so.

[George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess]

Moses, the writer, huh? Moses, the reporter? Moses, the secretary of JHWH?

Well, faith is one thing, facts are other. While there is not a single little record (except Torah) or any fragment of evidence to show, a guy called Moses lived in Egypt and leaded his people to Canaan, it's not very meaningful to discuss if he wrote the Pentateuch or not. On the other hand, all evidence showed so far that the earliest copy of the Old Testament was not written before 3rd century BCE.

Hebrew was the **first written language**

Blueridge's this statement is simply wrong and based only upon faith. While Sumerian cuneiform is acknowledged as the earlies...

Moses, the writer, huh? Moses, the reporter? Moses, the secretary of JHWH?

Well, faith is one thing, facts are other. While there is not a single little record (except Torah) or any fragment of evidence to show, a guy called Moses lived in Egypt and leaded his people to Canaan, it's not very meaningful to discuss if he wrote the Pentateuch or not. On the other hand, all evidence showed so far that the earliest copy of the Old Testament was not written before 3rd century BCE.

Hebrew was the **first written language**

Blueridge's this statement is simply wrong and based only upon faith. While Sumerian cuneiform is acknowledged as the earliest written form of an ancient language for the established science, even this assumption is being discussed among scholars. We are not hundred percent sure about the "first written language" but it is very certain that Hebrew wasn't. (Earliest cuneiform is dated to the beginning of the 3rd millenium BCE; Pre-dynastic samples of Egyptian hieroglyphes are from 2900 BCE or a little earlier; Akkadian cuneiform is from 2300 BCE. While the "predecessor" of the Hebrew script, the Phoenician alphabet appeared not before 1100 BCE, it does not make much sense to discuss if Torah's language was the first to be written.)

As for "The Deluge", as Johanna said, the earliest accounts of the story are at least 2000 years older than the Biblical one. Even the myths surrounding Ziusudra (Sumerian - early 3rd millenium), Utanapishtim and Atra-Hasis (both Akkadian, 23rd and 17th centuries BCE respectively) are probably not the earliest ones. Since Indus-Harappa script is yet to be deciphered and no written document was discovered at excavations in Mohenjo Daro and Mehrgahr, we do not know for sure if the Hindu "Mani myth" was born earlier or later than the Mesopotamian accounts.

(continues)

The problem is, when very long periods are involved, we can not be sure about how much of the "original story" remained authentic and how much of it was "revised" and changed, while it had been carried to the next generations via oral tradition before recorded using the first instants of ancient scripts. At this point our only choice is following the geological and archaeological findings and comparing the "blurry" facts with the stories told in ancient myths. Of course, we also need a little "intuition" here when dealing with uncertain data about a very distant past.

William Ryan and walter Pittman did exactly this, a few years ago and shared their "deluge theories" with the world which wa...

The problem is, when very long periods are involved, we can not be sure about how much of the "original story" remained authentic and how much of it was "revised" and changed, while it had been carried to the next generations via oral tradition before recorded using the first instants of ancient scripts. At this point our only choice is following the geological and archaeological findings and comparing the "blurry" facts with the stories told in ancient myths. Of course, we also need a little "intuition" here when dealing with uncertain data about a very distant past.

William Ryan and walter Pittman did exactly this, a few years ago and shared their "deluge theories" with the world which was focusing on "flooding of the Black Sea." Many more scholars are working on this subject; some try to combine the findings with Leonard Wooley's "Great Flood explanation" after his discoveries in Ur last century.

One thing looks very obvious: Our planet experienced such a catastrophe and some human beings witnessed this in distant past. Oral or written, many accounts of the deluge story from distant parts of the world have interesting common stuff in details. If and when we can decipher Linear A of the Minoans and the Harappan script, and also discover more written materials in both languages, probably we'll have some more accounts of the catastrophe. Even now, we have a rich collection of myths from Middle East to Asia, from the Mediterranean to Europe and from Mesoamerican lores to Pre-Inka culture in South America - as well as the "fragmented" and "controversial" discoveries in the fields of geology, palaeontology and archaeology.