The Flood Myth, Transcript

Transcript - The Flood Myth

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Transcript:

(00:03) our topic tonight is the flood myth before we get right into the flood myth

LDS and the Flood Myth

i want to have a little bit of a teaser background a couple years ago we went and visited the town or the area called short creek which is on the near the grand canyon on the border between utah and arizona there's two towns they're actually two different corporations but essentially there's no difference between the two they're called hilldale utah and colorado city arizona these are some of the pictures of what short creek those two towns together

(00:43) look like they're famous because this was the place where the it was built and settled by the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter-day saints one of who the patriarch of one of whose elder joe jessup here has in front of him his five wives his 46 children and his 239 grandchildren and so you can see um anyway how polygamy can result in a fast population increase for the for the patriarch right so for the women it's pretty much the same as monogamy or even actually it can be less than a monogamous marriage the flds church has been uh kind of made famous because of the

(01:29) very distinctive um dress that they've adopted within the last 20 30 years and also because of their president their profit uh warren jeffs who is in jail for all kinds of sorts of crimes and abuses that he has done so when you go to this place it's interesting because it's a community of extremes on the one hand there's these giant um very fancy compound houses where um you know rich leader would have lived or and all his wives and family and so forth and so very big kind of crazy spaces on the other hand

(02:07) there are all of these buildings that are just completely unfinished and one of the ways that this community has made money is is and and the building industry and going to places around nevada and arizona where they help build houses and other kinds of construction using all of their let's say children and descendants and so forth is fairly cheap or free labor and so on and they compete well in business-wise let's say we went to warren jeff's former compound which we toured and we saw how all of the phone taps and everything like that has put into his house so that he can

(02:45) monitor what everybody in the comp community was doing and we also had a kind of an insider tour where um we saw when an earlier stage this um the people there are very apocalyptic and they believe in the end of the world and so they built uh into a mine a kind of a place to store food and hide in the case of apocalypse all right so we've talked a little bit sometimes this is a diagram i've made of of some of the different denominations that exist within mormonism the the broader latter-day saint tradition movement and so the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter-day saints is actually

(03:23) just one of the polygamous offshoots of the of the brighamite or utah lds or mormon church so why did i bring that up well in that tradition that tradition goes back to joseph smith who is the founder who had some thoughts about the topic of the flood so early modern europeans read the bible literally and that they believed the flood story in genesis narrated a historic event and so they also assumed that at some point in history all humans and terrestrial animals were wiped out by a flood and the only

(04:07) ones that survived are the ones that there's the descendants and from the survivors that we're on know as ark and so joseph smith jr who's from this kind of early modern time period or modern time period also believed that and he tried to fit the americas into that biblical worldview that 19th century americans shared you know because something didn't add up so people who were these literal believers they believe in your universal flood they were hard-pressed to understand why are there all of these native animals and peoples in the americas how did they all get here considering they would have all been

(04:53) wiped out as recently as noah's flood and so in composing the book of mormon in 1830 uh joseph smith actually narrates two popular 19th century ideas on the one hand there is a story of refugees from the tower of babel in other words this is a story in genesis that takes place after uh the flood and then the refugees got onto boats in this story in the book of mormon and they bring animals with them in the boats and that's explain an explanation then for why all of these animals are in north and south america the second story in the book of mormon explains how native uh peoples are

(05:36) descended from uh lost ten tribes of israel and so there's two two different theories that take place actually in the book of mormon but the first one uh the er the one that would have taken place earlier uh you know with refugees from the tower of babel explains about the animals okay so in retrospect i think this explanation has a few holes so apparently all members of all american species must have gotten on boats from babel since none of those are left in the old world right so we don't have any of these kind of american you know species that

(06:14) are found in the americas only so again these refugees must have herded all of the the ones that had been anyway the descendants of those animals that had been on noah's in the ark they took some of them and those are the ones that end up in the americas they don't explain that in the book but that would have had to have been how it been anyway there's more holes in it than that so anyway between 1830 and 1840 tens of thousands of european americans and europeans were attracted to the book of mormon and the book of mormon's idea of connecting america the americas to the

(06:43) bible and joseph smith went on to announce that the second coming of christ was at hand and that the new jerusalem where jesus would reign in his millennial kingdom would be built in the united states on the frontier with the indians in the frontier town of independence missouri he later when he went to independence also said that the garden of eden had been located in that area in that same place where the new jerusalem would be so zion the new jerusalem the peaceable kingdom is a vision of a new eden and so joseph smith now also says

(07:21) that that jackson county missouri was the actual site of eden in other words prior to the universal flood all humans had lived in the western hemisphere and it's only after arriving in the eastern hemisphere did they go on noah's ark so noah and his anyway all of his ancestors going all the way back to adam and eve lived in this kind of area in missouri they built the ark there the flood covers the earth they're floating around for 40 days and so forth and when they're done and the flood starts to recede

(07:56) at mount erat in in the middle east then that's when they the human human species is transplanted according to this reinterpretation or new new idea that joseph smith taught like adam and eve the early latter-day saints were expelled from eden jackson county missouri and joseph smith went on to taught that when adam and eve left eden they moved to a place called adam onday amen which is in davis county missouri where he and his followers settled a new town they also settled a town called far west which is where it was said that kane had slew abel so anyway they're living out

(08:42) and thinking a lot about these genesis stories which they're taking literally and they are reimagining in their own lives uh on the american frontier and kind of an original and creative way

The Flood Myth

so literal readings of the genesis flood story still persist in this sort of amazing and graphic representation christian fundamentalists in kentucky have built a giant uh you know literal arc uh and and created a kind of a tourist site called arc encounter and this thing is um you know filled with the interior and its goal is is trying to um show

(09:27) how using the kind of technology that you'd see uh you know on the flintstones or something like that how you could fit all two of every kind of animal on the planet and how they could still be fed and how you could still eliminate their waste and so on using like i say i don't know all this kind of crazy stuff so it's of taking uh literalism to an amazing and impossible and a preposterous uh extreme so in addition to you know literal conceptions about the flood in genesis literal flooding does also continue this was a couple years ago there was flooding across north america and this

(10:05) is a town here in canada we actually had worse flooding last year in british columbia and so on but i only point out the one from a couple years ago is that ironically um the ark encounter also was flooded although i think they were able to put enough sandbags around it so that the ark didn't actually end up having to float away and preserve everything so yeah the flood proof is not insured against flood damage all right so let's look a little bit about uh the flood story as it exists in the book of genesis 6-9  in chapter six through

(10:42) nine so this is a tale of global holocaust that for some reason is frequently retold for children we've talked about before in two previous lectures which are who wrote the bible the documentary hypothesis and who wrote genesis we've talked about how there is a hypothetical two hypothetical sources that are involved that may explain why uh this story of noah and the flood in genesis 6 9 is is especially contradictory so literary scholars believe that the best explanation is that two different stories have been spliced together um everybody thinks that something has

(11:27) happened the other hypothesis would be something like there's an original source and then someone has gone through and added stuff to that but in some ways because the these two are they don't necessarily speak to each other as well as that anyway you could go either way on how to say it but anyway i'm just presenting it here as the documentary hypothesis there's something going on here with two voices let me look at it a little bit so i'm i'm calling anyway here in blue what i'm calling i'm identifying as the j source the yahweh source and i'm identifying the pink here as the priestly source

(12:04) so here's the story as it begins in or as it's part in genesis seven 7 1-2 and yahweh said to noah come you and all your household into an ark for i've seen you as virtuous in front of me this generation of all clean animals take seven pairs man and his woman and all that are unclean two man and his woman um and so uh you might know from uh anyway biblical law that there are certain animals that are clean to eat and others that are unclean to eat so you can't have you know so for shellfish and so forth the different kinds of um

(12:48) levitical rules and so in this passage it's very clear that god is saying you need to keep seven pairs of the clean animals uh but only two pairs of the unclean animals um you know as we say beyond the unclean ones there's apparently a bunch of animals that didn't get that get left off the ark entirely uh depending on again your kind of literal interpretation the um uh the the people in kentucky with that ark encounter believe that there were dinosaurs the dinosaurs had been living in the antediluvial times but somehow

(13:21) they i don't know exactly why they went extinct but essentially none of them were left to get on the on the flood whether they believe in unicorns and dragons i don't know probably not so why does noah need seven pairs of the clean animals you know the answer here even in the picture at the end of the story noah uh offers a sacrifice to god and so he uh has to kill animals in order to do that and that's uh then when the god creates the covenant with the symbol of the rainbow and so forth at the end of the story so noah built an altar to yahweh and he

(13:54) took some of the clean animals and each of the clean birds and he offered sacrifices on the altar and yahweh smelled the pleasant smell and yahweh said to his heart i won't curse the ground on account of humankind again so if there were actually 14 of many of the animals why are they ever only shown two by two and the answer is because there's another entirely different account within the genesis story that contradicts the one i just read so from the p source the pink story here it says of all living god says of all living of all flesh you shall bring two

(14:35) of each to the ark to be kept alive with you they shall be male and female of animals that were pure and of animals that were not pure and of the birds that creep and everyone that creeps on the ground they came by twos to noah to the ark as god had commanded noah so this story or this version here makes it very clear that both the clean and the unclean uh are are only you know there's only two of each one there's no seven pairs in this towing um so so we have these back between the two here those are just these side by side

(15:10) clean animals take seven pairs man and woman of the animals that were pure and of unpure they came by twos so this is a contradiction existing within the bible as we have it again another evidence that there's two different competing voices in the story that have been spliced together one of the things we can also point out here is that in the blue story god is referred to by name i've been saying yahweh this is the name of god that is not to be said and so it's written out with the four letters uh in english it's sometimes

(15:48) been called jehovah is how it's been said but anyway this is god but god's name whereas in the p source here in the pink one it doesn't call god by name and instead is calling deity by the word god elohim in hebrew so in other words this is another distinction and a track and it tracks with these two different kinds of sources what about the sacrifice so if this pea version as i've been saying only has two of every clean animal won't no accidentally or kill off you know all of the clean species in order to offer these kind of sacrifices

(16:24) to god you know so um anyway the things you would normally use for an animal sacrifice those are going to get all killed up so maybe the unicorns and so forth are the ones that get killed and that's why we don't have any huh but no because in the p version of noah's story there is no sacrifice so god proclaims a covenant which is sealed with a sign of the rainbow in the p story but no one in fact ever offers a sacrifice in the p story in the text prior to aaron and his descendants in exodus and so one of the reasons why we see

(17:04) that or we think that that's the case is why we call it the p source is that the p source is written by someone who considers himself to be a descendant of aaron and he is part of a centralizing religious movement that is trying to say that only descendants of aaron are able to offer sacrifices and they're only able to do it at the one place which is at the temple mount in jerusalem and so therefore nobody offers a sacrifice uh in the peace story you know previously at all so noah doesn't offer a sacrifice abraham doesn't try to offer sacrifice and so on

(17:42) in the p stories the peace story sacrifices only begin when god commands aaron to do it because that's the only time it would be valid anyway so when we take these two together those come together to form a redacted text of the noah story in genesis in other words we have the the j's version and the p version and that results like i say in the children's story that we all know and love so there's one problem today though for literalist believers and that is that there never was a universal flood so science's picture of the past was

(18:24) still pretty opaque and incomplete in 1830 when joseph smith and the early latter-day saint movement for example were trying to make literalistic explanations using new scripture in order to explain why there are people and animals in the americas given a universal flood nevertheless in the 21st century the sciences especially geology and paleontology have concluded that there could not have been a universal flood so the idea is incompatible with the geological and the fossil record which is ever more well known

(19:04) so the flood wasn't universal nevertheless flood myths nearly are so we've told this story actually like we said two interrelated stories that have been spliced together that are from judea but there were flood stories across the ancient world from mesoamerica to ancient greece to mesopotamia akad and sumer to india and china the flood stories exist also in european mythologies there's a flood in finnish mythology irish welsh and even norse mythology there's flood myths in african traditional african societies the messiah mabudi kawaya yaruba mandan

(19:52) and there's flood stories in east asia oceania from the maori to hawaii the philippines malaysia the andamans tide kadai peoples and also korea and there are flood stories across the americas everybody for the eskimos and the inuits the comax samish saanich anashinabe hopi uh musica topi canary inca and mapuche peoples i'm probably now not pronouncing all these right but anyway there's flood stories uh in all of these different places okay let's look at a couple of these so one of these ancient ones from the

(20:26) mesoamerica is the mayan flood myth so according to the mayan epic the popova which is one of the only only um mayan books that we have the codices that were actually not destroyed by uh the spanish uh colonists uh uh and instead was preserved fortunately anyway it's now been totally deciphered and the mind language can be read so according to that epic two eras of creation preceded the present creation of humankind that we're all still experiencing the second created era in the second created er the gods made people out of wood however because the wooden people could

(21:11) not speak they were not able to properly worship their creators and thus according to the text quote they were killed in the flood so they wiped them away and they started over again there's a flood myth from india the night the 10th century the common era is this representation here you can see with the fish uh giant fish and so on uh from the vedas though so um the vedas were probably composed in the 6th century bce and their current written form from the 300s this is a very early version of an indian flood story so in this

(21:47) tale king manu encounters a small fish named matsia who fears being eaten by a larger fish king manu lets matsia live and grow up in a pot of water and then in his pond and then when this flood came this universal flood uh matsia now a giant fish takes manu by boat to the himalayas which are so tall obviously that they're not covered by the waters and he's thus preserved there is a flood myth from ancient greek mythology according to hesiod the 7th century bce the titan one of the titans prometheus molded men out of water and clay and

(22:25) then gave them fire ex precisely contrary to the wishes of zeus the king of the gods who then punished the titan by chaining him to a mountain and having his eagle it was a symbol of zeus to eat out his liver every day only to have it regrow since he's a god to punish men zeus has hephaestus the smith of the gods create pandora the first woman big punishment here for the men and pandora here comes with a box which is not to be opened she opens it uh releasing all of the world's evils prometheus has a son named dekalian who marries pandora's daughter pira

(23:08) zeus decides to destroy all of the men of the bronze age with a flood this is by the way not the real bronze age this is the mythical greek bronze age with a flood prometheus warns his son who builds a floating chest and so after floating for days the chest lands on mount parnassus again up on top of a tall mountain because the whole earth is covered with water and ducalian and pira are instructed to throw walks over the shoulders which become new men and women of the new human race so they're not all descendants of these

(23:40) two but two alone were saved and they were given the kind of magical ability to repopulate the earth after a flood um there's floods like i said in mesopotamia so the earliest surviving flood stories come from ancient sumer so one the sumerian genesis which is surviving uh in an inscription form from 1600 bce but composed much much earlier and the epic of gilgamesh fragments of which survived from as early as 2100 bc so loads earlier than when the biblical story was composed thousands of years so the gods

(24:20) decide that human humanity is to be destroyed by a flood but aya or enki warns the story's hero to build an ark to survive saving the world's animals and plants so i mentioned here that this is kind of just a timeline that is relating to both the old testament but also the epic of gilgamesh you can see here it's kind of going from 4000 bce to you know the one bce and you can see at the very left if there had been a historic gilgamesh uh it's like from somewhere 2800 to 2500 uh epic of gilgamesh is maybe composed

(25:03) of 2100 and then you can see homer and deuteronomy and the pentateuch in other words the bible so much later thousands of years thousand more years later um uh in a much kind of a later time period obviously than what has happened back with the sumerian uh city-states some of the earliest uh of all of the civilizations all right let's look a little bit about the gilgamesh story since it has priority as the oldest in the sumerian genesis the surviving hero is ziya sudra who is the ruler of shurupak but in the epic of gilgamesh the survivor of the flood is utnapishtim

(25:43) who is given immortality and lives in the east in kind of a paradise land of dilmun so gilgamesh the hero of the epic when his friend and kidu is killed he becomes aware of his own mortality and decides to travel to dill moon to learn the secret of eternal life so until his friend dies he looks like any other young guy he just figures he's gonna live forever and he's strong and and so on but now he his friend is dead and he's now really struck wait a second i'm gonna die and so he housed on this quest to um knowing that uttapishtim has been

(26:22) granted eternal life maybe gilgamesh can find out that secret on this quest gilgamesh and his bitterness cries how can i rest how can i be at peace despair is in my heart what my brother is now his friend and kedu that i shall be when i'm dead because i am afraid of death i will go as best i can to find utnapishtim whom they call the far away for he has entered the assembly of the gods and so this is a map here of the little babylonian map anyway of the babylonian worldview which may be derived ultimately for how the

(27:04) sumerians who really influenced the babylonians what they essentially thought of how the world worked and so gilgamesh travels beyond the ocean the gardens of the sun beyond the edges of the mortal world to deal moon which is kind of like eden although obviously much earlier in terms of ideas so he encounters sudori the goddess of wine and saduri advises him gilgamesh where are you hurrying to you will never find that life for which you are looking when the gods created man they allotted to him death but life they retained in their own keeping as for you gilgamesh fill your belly

(27:44) with good things day and night night and day dance and be merry feast and rejoice let your clothes be fresh bathe yourself in water cherish the little child that holds your hand make your wife happy in your embrace for this too is the lot of man this is very very early um response to the complaint of mortality if you are going to die anyway you know eat drink and be merry and or also you know think about think about community think about your family your child your wife and so on countering good and compassionate so he

(28:22) goes on uh does not listen to her he comes completely wasted by his journey and gilgamesh finally reaches him the far away the survivor of the flood to whom the gods have given eternal life gilgamesh explains why he's made his quest and he says i wish to question you concerning the living and the dead how shall i find the life for which i am searching uttapishtim doesn't have a happier response for him than anybody else on this quest he says there is no permanence do we build a house to stand forever do

(29:00) we seal a contract to hold for all time the sleeping and the dead how alike they are they are like a painted death what is the difference between the master and the servant when both have fulfilled their doom this doesn't matter how rich you are you're going to die like everybody else doesn't matter that you're the greatest hero that ever was gilgamesh that's what this is what this is what it is to be immortal when the ununaki the judges come together and mameten the mother of destinies together they decree the fates of men life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose

(29:38) so utnapishtim explains that his own immortality was a gift from all the gods after he survived the great flood a universal calamity he then tells the story of the flood which is another epic that is embedded within the epic of gilgamesh and that story is strikingly similar to the story of genesis so uttapishtim concludes by asking you know who's going to assemble the gods for your sake gilgamesh this was a one-time gift that unipistim has received and it's not going to be repeated to prove his point

(30:13) utmapishtim challenges gilgamesh to just conquer sleep much less death so sleep is so much like death conquer sleep for six days and seven nights which the hero fails to do so he tries to stay up and he finds himself dozing and ultimately he falls asleep nevertheless as a consolation utnapishtim reveals a divine secret of a plant under the sea that will at least restore lost youth and so gilgamesh goes under the sea to harvest that and when he brings the plant back he says i will take this to uruk there i will give it to the old men to eat and last i shall eat and have back my

(30:53) lost youth so whilst he's returning with the flower that restores youth gilgamesh takes the opportunity to rest and bathe by a pool but while he does it a serpent rises out of the water and snatches it away which is why this is how we can tell in others this is how myths work this is why serpents can renew their youth by shedding their skin so if you've ever seen how snakes operate and as they grow that's every once a while they get to a size that they shed all of their own skin and it looks like they

(31:24) are made new again and so and those snakes have this power according to the gilgamesh myth because they snatched away this flower that gilgamesh then loses and is not able to be had for humans so humans can't renew their youth uh the way that snakes can gilgamesh laments was it for this that i have wrung out my heart's blood for myself i've gained nothing all right so it's a very sophisticated myth we've had a lecture on the epic of gilgamesh before but i really like it so um so one of the arguments so we've said scientifically there was no uh universal

(32:01) myth but then people argue okay maybe i don't you know you know this doesn't add up somehow for me though that if there's myths like this all across the world doesn't that mean that people have some kind of shared memory uh of something that was a universal myth and so forth doesn't the ubiquity of the myth argue for a flood people also as is their want are desperate to find a fabled kernel of truth behind the myth and so one of the most famous and very certain certainly neat and intriguing hypotheses is that some seven thousand years ago so

(32:41) maybe 5000 bce there had been a a huge a break that in the water as a water poured into what became the black sea and so in other words that it hadn't been it had been an open undersea lower than sea level area which suddenly um broke where seawater broke through and filled it up very rapidly causing um a very substantial i mean if you think of black sea that's just north of turkey it's actually um right in the middle of all of this current uh you know there's crimea right there right uh going on with ukraine and russia and

(33:17) so forth right now so um that this filled up and obviously even though this is not a universal flood it's certainly a very big flood and there might have been if this had been the case there might have been all kinds of human villages and so forth that had been existing and suddenly they were all wiped out all right so before we go continue that and think about that i want to tell a flood myth from my own family's story so the hamer family the ancient homeland of my paternal ancestors if you go back on the on the

(33:49) paternal line you know in to the early 1700s is new jersey so a very um historic land indeed and so this here on the left is a picture of um uh uh of a store in trenton new jersey in 1879 that are owned by my great great grandparents abram and anna hamer the little boy in the foreground is my great-grandfather charles hamer and he's standing next to his sister elizabeth with their mother anna this is also from my ancestors so on my father's mother's side her father oliver sold this is his model t ford car dealership in trenton new jersey in 1918

(34:33) as they were very early ford dealer this is grandpa soul the same guy here who had the had the garage this is him when i knew him when i was three years old in 1973 and he gave me a truck and so there is overlap here between grandpa soul and so forth uh and that so like i say this flood myth is set in my ancestral homeland of new jersey my great grandparents oliver and matilda seoul here they are on the jersey shore which is what people in jersey do during the summer time it's a little different in 1934 than it is in the reality tv shows these days

(35:12) here's my own grandfather bill hamer and his sister lauren and my great aunt wearing their amazing 1932 beachwear anyway okay enough of that but i tell that as a background is that this is oliver and matilda's soul's house in trenton during the 1936 flood when trenton was flooded and uh everybody here is wandering around in boats because the whole city is flooded here is my grandmother hamer gloria sol here in the center in the boat boating to her house in trenton during the 1936 flood so grandma hamer so here's me with grandma hamer who died about 10 years ago

(35:55) so before her death so despite the considerable general generational overlap and despite the fact that we know there was a a flood and there's a hamer flood story no flood story at all was passed on in the oral tradition grandpa soul never told me about a flood ground muscle i'm sorry grandma hamer never told me about a flood i'm personally aware of that flood because i've seen all these photos of my grandmother boating around in front of their house and so forth so uh it is very unlikely that anybody in the next generation of hamers has

(36:30) even seen this amount of awareness they don't they haven't seen these old pictures and so on and so they don't they haven't also talked to any of these grandparents who were all dead before uh before they were born so for the black sea story here we are requiring some 4 000 years of oral tradition so although my family's three generations failed to remember a flood that that's not compared to oral transmission of of antiquity there is no evidence that stories like noah's ark are built on thousands and thousands of years of oral tradition where some really impressive flood happened no

(37:05) doubt if that did happen um and it's maybe for the first little while people would remember that as a pretty big deal there is no cost to remember no cost to speculate or do you think for a second that that um influenced people who remember that and remember that and told that that's not how the story is told at all in any of these kinds of floods and none for example in terms of the biblical story none of the earliest prophets amos josiah isaiah micah none of them mentioned noah by contrast all of them

(37:34) know and reference david david isaiah speaks about moses in other words these stories the story of david the story of moses and so on those were already known and part of the culture when the earliest prophets exist when and were writing whereas the stories like no in the ark are written later probably because we have no evidence that they're known by the um uh the earliest prophets so where do these stories come from if it's not because some but there's actually some remember remembrance of a really big flood so ancient people had no developed science of paleontology they

(38:13) nevertheless frequently encountered fossils so for example in ancient greece and rome people regularly found and remarked upon and displayed the bones of giants in the first century bc the emperor augustus had a museum of giant bones built on the island of capri so they would find in these fossils marine fossils on top of mountains so as attested in ancient historical sources people frequently found the fossils of fish and so forth on mountains leading to them the question how could fish get up there so rather than preserving thousands of years of unattested oral tradition flood

(38:52) myths are most likely to be or more likely to be ideological which is to say how do you explain these fish uh how these stone fish or whatever fish fossils got on top of a mountain the answer is whatever there had been a universal flood at some time that brought them all up there according to this myth in other words an ideological myth that provides an explanation for a phenomenon that can't otherwise or wasn't otherwise able to be understood at the time so finding truth at best so while there is more truth to be found in flood stories then looking for

(39:29) kernels that is not the place to look for that truth in other words what place to find that truth is not to look at historicity so looking at the ideas for example for example that whole long component of the flood story in the epic of gilgamesh that i read we see from that story that as long ago as 4 000 years humans were struggling with the ideas of mortality and death of suffering of finding meaning in life and and asking themselves what constitutes a life well lived and so in my view that's where we should be looking for

(40:10) truth in these stories we shouldn't be trying to say well there must have been some kernel of truth there must have been some remembered flood and looking all around to see things like like i say the black sea yeah of course there are floods and that's one of the reasons why people tell stories where there are floods as a damage but that's the historicity of these stories is not where their their value lies all right well so as always i'm going to now interact with your questions questions that you have been uh leaving in the discussionsThe topic of the evening is the flood myth, beginning with a teaser background about Short Creek, a town near the Grand Canyon on the Utah-Arizona border.

Q&A

(40:46) and uh while leandro is providing those for me and then sending those to me i want to read and leave you with some discussion questions that you can be thinking about so our first question is is knowing the ark a suitable story for children and if it is if you agree that it is what is the moral that you think ought to be taught when we're telling this story to children number two when a sacred story comes down to us in a version that is clearly mythical so for example no matter what we know there is no universal flood where everything was wiped out

(41:30) what are the costs or benefits of insisting that there must have been some kind of historical truth so if in other words if you want to retell this story by saying oh well there really was a noah and but there was just a little tiny flood that existed somewhere in you know mesopotamia or something like that and all this happened but it wasn't you know i don't know in other words what are the what are the costs and benefits of insisting that there must be some kind of a historical kernel or truth as opposed to simply reading the story and reading it as a sacred story

(42:02) that is not history and three can you think of any examples and maybe some like share some of these uh of modern myths something that clearly started as a myth that has then become historicized so that people go back and believe now that that actually happened all right and so i'm going to have a glass of water and then maybe we'll get to if some of you left some questions i'll be able to interact with you um so thanks okay ron wagner asks was the north noah story created after the jews were captured and taken to babylon so dating uh the torah dating the uh

(43:00) pentateuch the you know first five books uh and especially you know in this case what we're talking about is genesis is a little bit complicated and different um different scholars think different things and so uh definitely what we can say is the genesis as we have it now or the or the the noah story as we have it now was composed after um or compiled together or edited together after even they've come back from babylon so not only when they were in babylon after they've come back but in terms of this if if the documentary hypothesis is correct and there's a j

(43:39) story and a p story some people myself included maybe argue that the j story exists the existed then or it was recomposed before the fall of jerusalem we don't know that but anyway if it was um it's still completely it would still be a later um addition to uh like a first temple jewish religion than some of the earlier prophets which is why again those earliest prophets isaiah and so forth don't talk about it and don't know i mean that's a negative evidence but we don't see see that story as known until later so it's if it was if it did

(44:20) exist if the j writer is writing such a story before um the babylonians conquer them it's not like there's not substantial babylonian or middle not melanie but mesopotamian influence so that story is very famous it could have still made it into jerusalem without everybody being conquered okay daryl scott asks when people teach do teach noah's ark to children what moral or theology do the teachers think they're teaching well that was my first question so darrell you've asked the same question that i'm asking

(44:55) i think what they're doing is um they've got a story and there's animals and kids like animals and uh and there's a rainbow and it's you know and so so i don't know maybe um i think that maybe a story that people think they're teaching is that uh if you're righteous and good god is going to save you um but if so that's uh heresy from a traditional christian standpoint which is to say it's not god's grace is not conditional like that and so i don't know what they're thinking they're teaching that's why i'm

(45:32) asking and i was actually saying why are we teaching this or why is this a kid's story so anyway um we would have to ask somebody who's actually teaching what they what they think i'm a little i'm i've been a little dubious of showing that to kids okay michael gerard says um does jesus mention of noah add any credence to the flood story um so so although i'm saying that um uh that the fact that the earliest prophets don't mention the flood story um is is an evidence that that it wasn't known or hadn't been created yet by the

(46:10) time that they were writing uh um the reason one of the reasons why um i think that that's it so that's negative evidence so when we say oh well that's omitted you know that's not it's not as strong as positive evidence where you s where somewhere you actually have something being said and we know that this is the origin or something like that i'm saying that since it's not present there we might assume that it hasn't been written yet but that there's no proof that it isn't written because it's negative evidence nevertheless the fact that jesus is mentioning it shows how important in fact the noah's

(46:41) story becomes later you know and so and so again uh because of how important the noah's story is after it's composed that adds to the um my argument that the fact that it wasn't mentioned earlier is is actually stronger evidence even though it's negative evidence right so does jesus's mention of the noah's story add any credence to it as if as though it was a literal story is what this is and i would say no because um the historical g's so one we don't know um we have to track down what whether let's say the historical jesus said any of the particular things

(47:20) uh in any of the accounts that we have and whether how credible we think him saying any of those things were and then two as we've talked about before in terms of the difference between you know the historical jesus and the jesus of scripture uh and the uh christ of theology um the historical jesus was living in the context that he's in uh second temple um judish people would have assumed that the flood had been a real event and so uh then he would be wrong so that would way that would it doesn't mean that it's more likely to be true next um

(47:58) fastball flakes is wanting to talk about that discussion question number three and so um that was the question where i asked what's a um what's something that began as a myth that people later historicized and started believing had exactly existed and so he says slenderman originally created for a web forum photoshop contest it's a good study in modern folklore and it's spread in the evolution of the story mythos at internet hyperspeed so it sounds very interesting i'm not aware of that phenomenon as i'll have to go look up slenderman and hear how that all went so

(48:32) it's very interesting thank you mark b asks how does the story of atlantis fit into the flood stories so the story of atlantis is is interesting because unlike a lot of myths uh we can't tell when the the myth was actually created um so waco is saying with the noah story we don't really know um how the uh the j author is probably the earliest author so how does the j author start come by that story is it is it a brand new composition of the yahwest the j author is it something that had been kind of in the oral tradition that jewish people of the first temple had

(49:13) gotten from the uh from their neighbors who had gotten her from so on and so on all the way back to um all the way back to the epic of gilgamesh and pischchim and stuff like that is that where it comes from we can't really say with the atlantis myth uh which is absolutely a myth we know who made it up and we know where it started which is it was created by plato so one of the very important early philosophers in ancient greece he made it up as a thought experiment there was no historical atlantis there

(49:44) has not there um at all searches for quests for the historical atlantis every time anybody wants to go to a thera and a volcano and say this is where atlantis was and it blew up that's absolutely wrong because plato made it up as a as a thought experiment story and his student aristotle said plato made it up you know we know where that comes from so um i know people love atlantis and they would like to have a historical atlantis we know that that's not there isn't one so so it's not relation related to the flood stories chris gomez

(50:23) why do you think the preemptive measure of building an arc was documented rather than created i'm not sure what the mean what you mean by that i'm sorry chris so documented rather than created um it's part of the story so that so one of the things in terms of uh having having an arc what's the point of the story what's the point of the story why do people write about it so um so the idea of it here is that this is how this is people telling a story of um in if there's two different there's multiple versions of the story so we'll go ahead and use the genesis story so because it's more more familiar to

(51:10) people god is destroying all of humanity and actually all creatures on the earth in other words there's a universal holocaust that's coming but simultaneously um god has you know one favorite uh on the planet that he decides to save um and so um the preemptive measure of building of an ark here is um is god giving the way out for that guy um and so you know i don't know it makes it there's makes it somewhat more um let's say realistic seeming or whatever than if it's just that god takes him like he takes enoch or elijah or

(51:53) something like that and then could put him back you'd think afterwards i mean i think in the way it's more um uh it's less there's less magic involved than in the greek story where the gods save the um the people in a box and when they come out they get to throw stones over their backs and that creates new people right that's um that becomes a little less historical seeming right but anyway um it's just part of how the story uh unfolds in order to show god's interaction with his prophet dionysius infinitum says

(52:27) shouldn't we be teaching that the earth itself is an ark and it should be preserved and that the mythical noah was the first environmentalist well that's yeah i think that would be a wonderful um uh story to teach with the um to teach you know to take this take this ancient story and purpose it to our needs today right so um as never before obviously um the earth is incredibly smaller uh you know kind of a you know in a practical sense than it had ever been back when these uh flood stories were first told you know so we are now in a place where um

(53:06) you know you can travel all around the world it's all known you can you can go home and or your home right now you can look around on google earth and zoom in on satellite to any part of it in other words it's all completely known and you can travel to it and so forth but we can also because there's so many of us and we're in the middle of doing all things we can also cause um total and irreparable damage to this we're actually all stuck on this together this arc and in fact there's not another one so anybody who thinks that it's going to be easy to get on a lifeboat to moon or mars that is

(53:37) not those are it's a lot easier to live in antarctica than it is to live uh in those places and it's not pretty particularly easy to live in antarctica as you probably in many ways we know so anyway yes we should maybe be thinking of that uh so ron wagner has some ideas for the um has some ideas for uh uh you know the three questions and so for the first one which was um should we tell this to children if so what's the moral and he says i do think it's okay to tell children and the moral he would like to say is follow god's direction wherever it takes

(54:13) you so i think that that's a good story so you know have faith um we don't know what this arc is going to be necessarily even for god tells people to vote in the middle of the desert and so on but it ends up uh it ends up having a good and in that way um number two uh was the what's the question for number two can i see if again okay okay the number two was what are the cost and benefits of of insisting that a a sacred story that's clearly myth actually has a kernel of truth um and so he says one of the consequences of it and a detraction of

(54:48) it you know is that it could really lead to a false sense of history and i completely agree with you ron i also think it also completely distorts the story so in other words whatever the meaning of the story was the story in the case of the noah story is it's about universal holocaust it's not um it's not some little thing that happens somewhere or whatever so i think to warp the story around to try to make it literal um literally historic uh misses the whole point of the story and then ron has the example of uh in question number three of a myth that has

(55:21) been historicized of washington chopping down the cherry tree that's a very famous one where um george washington's kind of popular biographer um told the story of washington chops down a cherry tree and uh and then he goes and tells his dad that he did it and misses it and it he shows that she says i cannot tell a lie and so that's showing his character from an early childhood that even though he's a little rascal like all young boys who gets you know uses hatchet to chop down trees and so forth that shouldn't be he nevertheless has in such integrity

(56:00) that he's going to always be honest forever and that's what he's showing um and then and then kind of famously that story um has been debunked and so that's um like you say so even though that story is there and people assumed it was history it's more it's kind of maybe the most famous story of uh of a guy a story that doesn't have any basis but nevertheless that that particular example um is one of those cases where we can't say it for sure so there's a bunch of debunkings where we can say okay there's

(56:32) the noah's story there is no historical basis for that at all uh with this um the cherry tree story is actually a little more nuanced and so there is we don't have we don't have we just have negative evidence in other words we don't we don't have the story the story isn't told in anywhere we can find it before this biography but that doesn't necessarily mean that uh that he didn't have some source that was possible anyway now i'm not saying i'm not saying the territory story happened but what i'm saying is that we can't as easily say it absolutely didn't happen

(57:03) all right next um stephanie so stephanie is saying for in terms of the questions um the noah and their story first question that's not a story for children she says you might as well tell them if their art doesn't turn out as planned to throw a tantrum and tear it up rip it up to shreds so god here is not being a good example for kids to follow in terms of him the god of the old testament sometimes does things that seem you know very let's say bizarre and not very particularly good and like you say maybe infantile here as he's uh throwing a tantrum to and the tantrum

(57:43) results in a global holocaust uh two in terms of uh stephanie's question here for the second one about um the costs of um trying to insist that there's a kernel of a truth in a story that's really uh myth she says that the cost here is to your own credibility and also uh your your moral we don't take spiritual lessons from history books so yeah so again we need to people have spent the last couple hundred years especially um really emphasizing and valuing historicity when when people talk about stories and and it's like a story that uh didn't

(58:25) happen or something like that people say well that's not true or they'll talk about that did that you know or and they'll ask you know when somebody tells a story about that happened to them is that true you know as if truth is um history but stephanie here is rightly right to tell us here we don't draw spiritual lessons from history books you can learn from history in different kinds of ways um but the authors of these stories the genesis story and things like that those are written before the invention of history as a discipline at all it's

(58:59) not meant to be a history book it is however meant to talk about the human condition and certainly like i say when we read that story from the epic of gilgamesh that still resonates and that's been thousands and thousands of years and then stephanie just says in terms of uh um myths that have been history historicized she just says american history so that's kind of a blanket condemnation of how people understand american history and um there's something to be said for that i mean of course that's true for everybody's

(59:35) history you know we as societies all um uh tell stories identity stories of how we want to understand ourselves to be um and unfortunately that tends to paper over all the things that we don't want to you know understand about ourselves and so uh and so that's true at all the time so um mike rogers says isn't the book of mormon the attempted historization of an american creation myth does that mean that third nephi 11 didn't occur in fact so um so mike my view is and that we can say without we can say very clearly from an academic perspective from a historical

(1:00:19) archaeological and uh literary critical analysis of the book of mormon it is absolutely written in the 19th century and it does not refer to historical events that occurred before that time so in fact the events in third nephi and in fact everything in the book of mormon did not occur uh as in history does it say it's like the story of the prodigal son or something like that in other words or the uh beautiful stories like the book of ruth daniel these are stories that uh you know in the ark these are stories that are not histories that's right they're stories that don't have they're literary and only

(1:01:04) next we have to scroll all right michael gerard says um do indigenous peoples of the united states have flood stories um yes so i didn't have um when we did that whole map uh i don't remember which al which all the ones they were but i um kind of at the middle of the lecture um i was showing how kind of flood stories are ubiquitous and those are true all the way across the americas and several of those peoples i think are are and i remember for example um uh eskimo was one of the ones that were on the list but anyway there are other ones too that are from the united states

(1:01:49) as opposed to canada so there's first nations people in canada that have flood stories and same thing indigenous peoples of the us too yes bob garrison asks do young earth creationists take this story literally yes yes they do and so um younger creationists are are people who um who believe that their planet is only 6000 years old or something like that and so they as a result deny all scientific reality and instead make a kind of a a counter science of pseudoscience of their own and and the flood is massively important uh for their pseudoscience and so all kinds

(1:02:34) of crazy things like the reason why there are those fossils up on top of mountains and things like that that's because of the flood because which was very literal for young earth creationists there is no scientific basis for any of it isn't completely impossible it's it's a counter reality world view try to hard for fun asks how would you answer a mystical reading of the great flood that the flood waters as a symbol of gods cleansing the earth of evil and wickedness not that there was an actual physical flood yeah so i i think that that would be fine and great and in fact

(1:03:12) um there's uh in terms of that i mean there's a there's been modern christian um and christian interpretations where i mean it might have been the new testament that where where the um uh the flood is seen symbolically as a as a baptism of the earth right um and so in in which case it's a symbolic one right where the same thing symbolically in baptism um the old person dies and then comes out of the water reborn anew right and so in the same way um the the old cardinal world is is uh cleansed and begins a new life a new um but not something that actually happened it's symbolic i mean you can

(1:03:58) baptisms happen but you're not really dying right so it would be symbolic in that same sense so i think that's a good a definitely a good way to read it um maybe also considering it didn't happen in terms of historical literal history wanda mercer asks with all these universal myths what sense are we to make out them theologically important for us in our day and age well wonder you know there have been um you know there have been a bunch of the of different options that people have even given already in the in the comments so i think some of which are

(1:04:33) good the one we just barely talked about this idea um of um you know death rebirth and renewal and so on um uh uh and so i think that there are you know there are different ways that we can kind of read these and one of the other proposals was um uh that has given earlier in the comments was should we should we take this as a uh reminder of the sacredness of creation and how um you know we're where is stewards of the planet and that we should um be treating that accordingly uh and that you know we can cause horrible destruction in our own

(1:05:15) limited time that we exist on the earth and then there's all the people after us that have to deal with all of the waste and and problems that we've created in our time and so forth and so i think i think that we can still drive value from from these but we just have to rethink them think of them like has been suggested mythically symbolically mystically and so forth um chris gomez says could you speak more on the universal holocaust does the concept inherently require the agency of a higher power in the flood story i'm not sure

(1:05:53) where i see regular people being participants so the the being that's committing the universal holocaust is god or the gods depending on the you know if it's a polytheist story and so it's not um um it's not something like a holocaust uh like what when we talk about the holocaust we usually when we talk about the holocaust we're talking about uh world war ii and the nazis and uh killing all of the uh jews and everyone else that the nazis uh killed um i was using this as like in the not in the in that particular form but just in general

(1:06:31) when you were just killing off everybody you say a genocide or something like that you could also call it but it's just bigger than the genocide because it's killing everybody and everything on the planet and so that's what i meant by um by any by using that word uh universal holocaust um specifically everything and everybody is wiped off the planet um you know both in the noah story and in the um uh the gilgamesh story the the and so on so all right well folks this has been a fun one um i i hope you've enjoyed it i've really appreciated your comments and the discussion um i'll remind you i don't

(1:07:16) know if we can have uh slides back and go back to those or are we gonna have one more comment just one oh there's one more comment nevermind let's here's a good question lander tells okay here we go uh michelangelo says i have a question what do you think of levy strauss's ideas about universal myths or jung collective unconsciousness as explanations for the universality of these myths so so i'm not i'm not opposed to those kinds of ideas so i think that i think that there is i think something to be said for the idea of of universal

(1:08:00) myths and also a collective unconsciousness um what i'm not i'm not um as i'm not as particularly committed to the very particulars of those two schools of thought but the idea that there are let's say commonly held archetype archetypes that transcend individual cultures i think is is perfectly plausible there's we find uh very common things and themes but they don't they're not so in terms of calling them universal myths or the universality of them in terms of the collective unconscious i would say i would say they're they tend to not be totally universal because because there's almost always a counter type to

(1:08:50) the archetype and so there are almost always you can set find you know almost everybody's believe has this kind of a story but then these guys over here have a different take you know and so almost everybody sees this this way but other people there are some cultures that see things kind of differently so so i guess i would say is that um that there are that some of the there's some of these broad ideas and they are um valuable to explore uh uh i enjoy talking uh and very interested in exploring kinds of archetypes and those kind of things but for me i think

(1:09:26) the important thing is to detach them from a sense or a theory that you might have that there's historicity behind them it's not that there is a a collective memory of some historical event that is is being passed along through un um uh unintentional oral tradition or something like that unconsciously or something like that i don't think that that's the case in other words there may be themes that are things like gilgamesh was worried about which is to say suffering mortality uh other those things like

(1:10:03) that those are those are themes that exist maybe more universally but those don't don't go back to um one historical moment when the first guy realized that uh that he's gonna die or the first woman the reality is people were dying before they understood you know before they really consciously understood anything like that since we go back to much more primitive or beings that have much less sophisticated thinking capacity so that's what i would say richard goodman responding to question number two in terms of the cost and benefit of insisting that there's a kernel of truth

(1:10:40) behind myths he says benefits i'm thinking i'm thinking of the loch ness monster that mysteries in existence have a tangible peril in reality that our imagination can bridge so yeah i'm just trying to think about this so so i'm i'm not against being imaginative um uh and i and i do i actually do think um i don't know wanting to have uh mystery and enchantment in our life is i think and being imaginative about that i think a positive desire i don't think that we should have a um i don't know a world that is totally deflated of enchantment and where where everything

(1:11:27) is uh is very uh i don't know ice bucket cold ice bucket poured over top of everybody at all times because nothing fun exists and so on so i i agree with you on that point i don't know though that too much time should be spent in extreme um let's say extreme ideas of making pseudo-scientific explanations of the loch ness monster existing or bigfoot or something like that and getting really into that because we can it can take you down a kind of a i don't know kind of a crazy conspiracy theory alternate reality so so it would just be a matter of um balancing that

(1:12:01) and keeping the fun as opposed to um getting into kind of a twisted counter reality okay so now we're going to conclude thank you all so much wonderful discussion i really enjoyed it and we will uh have a lecture on christian militancy on thursday and we'll see you next week for the book of jasher i don't have slides you