4 ms·

In the 60s I read a (crackpot?) theory that the Old Testament was not kidding when it says people lived hundreds of years, and that a sudden influx of cosmic ra

In the 60s I read a (crackpot?) theory that the Old Testament was not kidding when it says people lived hundreds of years, and that a sudden influx of cosmic rays could explain a nexus of Biblical events - the dispersion of a persistent global cloud cover that had existed until then, the rain & flooding event that Noah rode out, and the subsequent reduction (thanks for nothin', cosmic rays) in human lifetimes.

xattt 3y ago
If anything, cosmic rays would (stochastically) seed clouds. Constant cloudiness would suggest that Earth was under bombardment at that time. (1) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1076964 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1076964
i67vw3 3y ago
Fun thing about the Noah 'story' is that the exact same story is present in Hinduism. It goes something like, God selected a righteous person to help humanity survive the flood. He has this individual built a big ship in which humanity and animals can survive. The only difference in the story is that God took a form of small fish which grew larger as the flood date came close. In the end it became so big that it was able to steer the big ship during flood waves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsya https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsya
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  The story in the Vedas probably has the same origin as the Mesopotamian flood myths. The oldest surviving Akkadian and Sumerian references to the flood precede and are pretty close in time to the Aryan expansion to the Indian subcontinent, and the Mesopotamian cities had long-lasting trade, cultural and military links to the peoples living in the Iranian plateau. I love speculating on the origin of the flood myths. My personal favorites are long-lasting oral traditions about the Black Sea flood and the Persian Gulf flood, both of which were rapid, catastrophic large-scale floods of large areas that were previously settled by humans. Sadly, the true origin is probably a lot more banal -- the oldest surviving fragmentary literary evidence refers to the specific city that flooded, Shuruppak, or modern Tell Fara. There is indeed a significant flood layer there (60cm of alluvial sand!) at about the right time (2900BC), but this was left by a normal river avulsion that created a violent but local flood.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    >The oldest surviving Akkadian and Sumerian references to the flood precede and are pretty close in time to the Aryan expansion to the Indian subcontinent, and the Mesopotamian cities had long-lasting trade, cultural and military links to the peoples living in the Iranian plateau. Note that the oldest attested Indic people lived to the west of the Iranian plateau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni
  - Zancarius 3y ago
    Have you ever read John Walton's "The Lost World of the Flood?" Admittedly he coauthored it with Tremper Longman, so different views are presented in the text, but I'm currently working through it. It's quite interesting and makes a good companion to his book "Lost World of Genesis One." Some things just off the top of my head: Much of the story is probably a polemic (or has polemical qualities), it ties into the Genesis 6:4 Watcher theology (and much of the Second Temple period literature on the subject), and... the description of the ark has some translational issues that we rarely touch on. In particular, we have no idea what "gopherwood" is. Or if it's even a wood. Most probably it was thatching.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    It could have been the asteroid hit to the Michigan ice sheet that set off the Younger Dryas period. That hit sent enormous ice boulders flying which hit all over the U.S. creating the "Carolina bays", and which may also have hit the Atlantic and send huge waves over northeastern Africa.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  The flood story is everywhere. I forget count, but it was hundreds, every culture around the world has a flood myth. Something happened, people speculate on melting ice, tidal waves, or something. Stories are passed down for a long time, maybe this magnetic field switch had something to do with the stories..
  - Tuna-Fish 3y ago
    Meh. "The flood myth" seems to have a single, local origin, somewhere in Mesopotamia, possibly literally just the city of Shuruppak. There are plenty of other flood myths, but that just makes sense because floods in river valleys are pretty common as far as disasters go and that's where most of the early civilizations were started.
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    At the time any of those myths would have originated, nobody really had any concept of a "global" anything. If the local river flooded, that was your _entire world_. Lots of local flood stories, then once the bronze age got going and trade routes and cities and writing, they started getting coalesced into more regional myths.
  - i67vw3 3y ago
    'Flood myths' possibly seen in China (Yellow river), Africa (Nile river) or Native Americas are quite different than the story of Noah and Manu. Noah and Manu have the same characters and exact 'screenplay' in quite detail (only difference being the fish). Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region. It is the only the story from vedic writings that matches from the Hebrew bible. Other than this story as far as I know all Hindu texts differ.
    - alephknoll 3y ago
      > Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region. They can't have the same ancestors because one is of aryan lineage and the other is of semitic lineage. It's more likely these cultures and peoples borrowed from the same story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
- darkwater 3y ago
  And it really boggles my mind that with all these evidences, people still think that supernatural stories based on the OT myths are real...
beAbU 3y ago
The OT is 1000s of years of pre-Christian history that was mostly told by word of mouth, all captured on parchment 1000s of years after it happened. Then it was all selectively collected and copy edited into a single volume another 1300 years after the period of the old testament ended. Sure, some events in the OT probably happened, but if I go by how much I exaggerate sometimes when telling a story, the Great Flood probably was just a dam that broke it's banks or something. Also doesn't help that every major culture that's old enough has a Great Flood in their history somewhere. It's almost like it's a TV trope of the ancient times. Nothing in the OT can be ascribed to christianity alone. Things were much more... "fluid" then, and the concept of organised religion did not exist. Things happened, and people blamed the gods/demons/monsters/spirits/forefathers. Only after the fact were these stories appropriated by organised religion for whatever purpose or reason. Folks living 100s of years: maybe they lived 100s of full moons, or seasons? Maybe the number was rounded up with every retelling to make the subject of the story appear more heroic? There is just no way that we can ever filter out the fact from the fiction in these old books I think.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  I like the theory that The Great Flood(s) were related to the Ice Age glaciers melting away.
  - namaria 3y ago
    Look up a graph of rising sea levels after the last glacial age. Writing starts precisely where the graph levels of to current levels.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    After reading accounts of floods on the Mississippi before it was embanked and straightened. I'd totally believe that sort of stuff happened on the Tigris and Euphrates's rivers back 5000 years ago when it was wetter. We can make it to the road in a homemade boat That's the only thing we got left that'll float It's already over all the wheat and the oats
- TomK32 3y ago
amelius 3y ago
Fake news is not a modern concept.
Zancarius 3y ago
It goes back a little earlier, but if you pardon the pun, Young Earth Creationism is itself a fairly young theology. The predominant idea behind YEC stems from the 1920s and Seventh Day Adventism, particularly Ellen G. White who claims she had a vision of man and dinosaurs walking the Earth together. Her claims would have disappeared into history as the ramblings of a cultish leader until they were more or less popularized by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb—and yes, in the 1960s. There's a lot of bonkers theology that rose to popular culture during that time period. Incidentally, it's also when Gog/Magog were ascribed to Russia (because of the Cold War), and if you read the papers by Dr. Paul Tanner on the subject, it becomes quite clear that the extent of exegesis performed basically amounts to cross-linguistic homophones—that is, that one of the regions (princes?) listed in Ezekiel, Rosh, happens to sound like the Indo-european root "Rus." Therefore, obviously, it's Russia... Facepalm. I'm a Christian, and I lean more toward Dr. John Walton's view of Genesis 1, that it was intended as a functional description of the created order. We forget that the culture that produced the Bible was vastly different from our own, and the Israelites saw things as "uncreated" if they served no purpose. That is, the idea of nihility (or creation ex nihilo) are modern ideas that we have imposed on the text in order to satisfy a narrow reading of scripture. Even if you're not a believer, as one of my sibling comments suggests, the oral tradition itself seems to capture events from the end of the last period of glaciation. But to assume people lived for 100s of years despite the fact we know almost nothing about the period during which the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) was authored (and we know little about how/when it was redacted, though most probably during the Exile) is naive. The ages most likely conveyed some meaning themselves, because the early Israelites were much less interested in exacting chronology than we are. Here's an example: Sarah is said to have lived 127 years. Interestingly, 7 being the number of completeness/perfection in Israelite culture and 120 (or 110) representing the same in early Egyptian culture seems to convey the idea that she lived the "perfect" (or "complete") life as both an Egyptian and Israelite woman. This may be stretching the numerology somewhat, but if you step outside YEC material, there is some scholarship that makes a pretty strong case for this reading.

xattt 3y ago

If anything, cosmic rays would (stochastically) seed clouds. Constant cloudiness would suggest that Earth was under bombardment at that time. (1) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1076964 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1076964

i67vw3 3y ago

Fun thing about the Noah 'story' is that the exact same story is present in Hinduism. It goes something like, God selected a righteous person to help humanity survive the flood. He has this individual built a big ship in which humanity and animals can survive. The only difference in the story is that God took a form of small fish which grew larger as the flood date came close. In the end it became so big that it was able to steer the big ship during flood waves. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsya https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsya

Tuna-Fish 3y ago
The story in the Vedas probably has the same origin as the Mesopotamian flood myths. The oldest surviving Akkadian and Sumerian references to the flood precede and are pretty close in time to the Aryan expansion to the Indian subcontinent, and the Mesopotamian cities had long-lasting trade, cultural and military links to the peoples living in the Iranian plateau. I love speculating on the origin of the flood myths. My personal favorites are long-lasting oral traditions about the Black Sea flood and the Persian Gulf flood, both of which were rapid, catastrophic large-scale floods of large areas that were previously settled by humans. Sadly, the true origin is probably a lot more banal -- the oldest surviving fragmentary literary evidence refers to the specific city that flooded, Shuruppak, or modern Tell Fara. There is indeed a significant flood layer there (60cm of alluvial sand!) at about the right time (2900BC), but this was left by a normal river avulsion that created a violent but local flood.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  >The oldest surviving Akkadian and Sumerian references to the flood precede and are pretty close in time to the Aryan expansion to the Indian subcontinent, and the Mesopotamian cities had long-lasting trade, cultural and military links to the peoples living in the Iranian plateau. Note that the oldest attested Indic people lived to the west of the Iranian plateau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni
- Zancarius 3y ago
  Have you ever read John Walton's "The Lost World of the Flood?" Admittedly he coauthored it with Tremper Longman, so different views are presented in the text, but I'm currently working through it. It's quite interesting and makes a good companion to his book "Lost World of Genesis One." Some things just off the top of my head: Much of the story is probably a polemic (or has polemical qualities), it ties into the Genesis 6:4 Watcher theology (and much of the Second Temple period literature on the subject), and... the description of the ark has some translational issues that we rarely touch on. In particular, we have no idea what "gopherwood" is. Or if it's even a wood. Most probably it was thatching.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  It could have been the asteroid hit to the Michigan ice sheet that set off the Younger Dryas period. That hit sent enormous ice boulders flying which hit all over the U.S. creating the "Carolina bays", and which may also have hit the Atlantic and send huge waves over northeastern Africa.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
The flood story is everywhere. I forget count, but it was hundreds, every culture around the world has a flood myth. Something happened, people speculate on melting ice, tidal waves, or something. Stories are passed down for a long time, maybe this magnetic field switch had something to do with the stories..
- Tuna-Fish 3y ago
  Meh. "The flood myth" seems to have a single, local origin, somewhere in Mesopotamia, possibly literally just the city of Shuruppak. There are plenty of other flood myths, but that just makes sense because floods in river valleys are pretty common as far as disasters go and that's where most of the early civilizations were started.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  At the time any of those myths would have originated, nobody really had any concept of a "global" anything. If the local river flooded, that was your _entire world_. Lots of local flood stories, then once the bronze age got going and trade routes and cities and writing, they started getting coalesced into more regional myths.
- i67vw3 3y ago
  'Flood myths' possibly seen in China (Yellow river), Africa (Nile river) or Native Americas are quite different than the story of Noah and Manu. Noah and Manu have the same characters and exact 'screenplay' in quite detail (only difference being the fish). Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region. It is the only the story from vedic writings that matches from the Hebrew bible. Other than this story as far as I know all Hindu texts differ.
  - alephknoll 3y ago
    > Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region. They can't have the same ancestors because one is of aryan lineage and the other is of semitic lineage. It's more likely these cultures and peoples borrowed from the same story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
darkwater 3y ago
And it really boggles my mind that with all these evidences, people still think that supernatural stories based on the OT myths are real...

beAbU 3y ago

The OT is 1000s of years of pre-Christian history that was mostly told by word of mouth, all captured on parchment 1000s of years after it happened. Then it was all selectively collected and copy edited into a single volume another 1300 years after the period of the old testament ended. Sure, some events in the OT probably happened, but if I go by how much I exaggerate sometimes when telling a story, the Great Flood probably was just a dam that broke it's banks or something. Also doesn't help that every major culture that's old enough has a Great Flood in their history somewhere. It's almost like it's a TV trope of the ancient times. Nothing in the OT can be ascribed to christianity alone. Things were much more... "fluid" then, and the concept of organised religion did not exist. Things happened, and people blamed the gods/demons/monsters/spirits/forefathers. Only after the fact were these stories appropriated by organised religion for whatever purpose or reason. Folks living 100s of years: maybe they lived 100s of full moons, or seasons? Maybe the number was rounded up with every retelling to make the subject of the story appear more heroic? There is just no way that we can ever filter out the fact from the fiction in these old books I think.

BurningFrog 3y ago
I like the theory that The Great Flood(s) were related to the Ice Age glaciers melting away.
- namaria 3y ago
  Look up a graph of rising sea levels after the last glacial age. Writing starts precisely where the graph levels of to current levels.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  After reading accounts of floods on the Mississippi before it was embanked and straightened. I'd totally believe that sort of stuff happened on the Tigris and Euphrates's rivers back 5000 years ago when it was wetter. We can make it to the road in a homemade boat That's the only thing we got left that'll float It's already over all the wheat and the oats
TomK32 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

Fake news is not a modern concept.

Zancarius 3y ago

It goes back a little earlier, but if you pardon the pun, Young Earth Creationism is itself a fairly young theology. The predominant idea behind YEC stems from the 1920s and Seventh Day Adventism, particularly Ellen G. White who claims she had a vision of man and dinosaurs walking the Earth together. Her claims would have disappeared into history as the ramblings of a cultish leader until they were more or less popularized by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb—and yes, in the 1960s. There's a lot of bonkers theology that rose to popular culture during that time period. Incidentally, it's also when Gog/Magog were ascribed to Russia (because of the Cold War), and if you read the papers by Dr. Paul Tanner on the subject, it becomes quite clear that the extent of exegesis performed basically amounts to cross-linguistic homophones—that is, that one of the regions (princes?) listed in Ezekiel, Rosh, happens to sound like the Indo-european root "Rus." Therefore, obviously, it's Russia... Facepalm. I'm a Christian, and I lean more toward Dr. John Walton's view of Genesis 1, that it was intended as a functional description of the created order. We forget that the culture that produced the Bible was vastly different from our own, and the Israelites saw things as "uncreated" if they served no purpose. That is, the idea of nihility (or creation ex nihilo) are modern ideas that we have imposed on the text in order to satisfy a narrow reading of scripture. Even if you're not a believer, as one of my sibling comments suggests, the oral tradition itself seems to capture events from the end of the last period of glaciation. But to assume people lived for 100s of years despite the fact we know almost nothing about the period during which the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) was authored (and we know little about how/when it was redacted, though most probably during the Exile) is naive. The ages most likely conveyed some meaning themselves, because the early Israelites were much less interested in exacting chronology than we are. Here's an example: Sarah is said to have lived 127 years. Interestingly, 7 being the number of completeness/perfection in Israelite culture and 120 (or 110) representing the same in early Egyptian culture seems to convey the idea that she lived the "perfect" (or "complete") life as both an Egyptian and Israelite woman. This may be stretching the numerology somewhat, but if you step outside YEC material, there is some scholarship that makes a pretty strong case for this reading.