Noah's traditions

[Willum]

Simple question.
Let's assume the Bible is a true account, but question things about it.

How do we know anything recorded before Noah is accurate?
All of Biblical history is bottlenecked through that one person, and his sons
If we accept his word, that he was good and just and had a perfect memory, we'd be fools.
Did the sons argue about a version? Did all four of them have eidetic memory?

How do we know the forces of evil didn't warp Noah or his generations whilst they were still few in number?
How do we know his memory didn't fail?
Etc.?

You get the idea. Thoughts?

[Difflugia]

Even aside from the hypothetical sense you describe, this is known to be a problem with parts of the Bible.

When the Assyrians laid siege to Jerusalem, the Bible claims (2 Ki 19) that an angel killed almost 200,000 Assyrian soldiers. The survivors then retreated.

According to the Assyrians, Hezekiah bribed them to leave and then continued to pay tribute thereafter.

For the vast bulk of pre-exilic Israelite history, the Bible itself is exactly the kind of information bottleneck you're talking about.

[SallyF]

Even aside from the hypothetical sense you describe, this is known to be a problem with parts of the Bible.

When the Assyrians laid siege to Jerusalem, the Bible claims (2 Ki 19) that an angel killed almost 200,000 Assyrian soldiers. The survivors then retreated.

According to the Assyrians, Hezekiah bribed them to leave and then continued to pay tribute thereafter.

For the vast bulk of pre-exilic Israelite history, the Bible itself is exactly the kind of information bottleneck you're talking about.

Which demonstrates that biblical "scripture" is often nothing more than nationalist propaganda.

There being a total absence of evidence for the input of any god into the human writings.

Pretending for a moment that the genocidal flood in Noah's time also references real events …

We can see from the Assyrian example that the "Word of God" cannot be trusted to give an accurate account.

We cannot then be confident that any virgin birth or resurrection in "scripture" is not people just distortin' history for propaganda purposes.

[Willum]

[Replying to post 3 by SallyF]

[Replying to post 2 by Difflugia]

Thank you both. That is what I believe as well.

Now, if we could just suspend reality a moment to talk about the topic?

[Elijah John]

[Replying to post 1 by Willum]

Are you saying that since the flood story is clearly implausible that the Bible has no value or validity? If not, I'm not sure what you are getting at.

You asked for thoughts. I sometimes wonder if the Ancients took this, and other stories like it literally, or if even they realized it was myth. Or if the author of Genesis intended it as myth.

Judaism to this day seems to take it literally, as that religion teaches that Gentiles only need to abide by the 7 laws of Noah in order to find salvation. Or to inherit a "portion in the world to come".

Unless the Rabbis too, realize Genesis is myth and are of the mind that doctrines can be derived even from pious myth.

[Difflugia]

Thank you both. That is what I believe as well.

Now, if we could just suspend reality a moment to talk about the topic?

How far do we want to suspend it? I answered the way I did in part because I wasn't sure exactly how to answer your original question. Depending on how far we suspend our disbelief, we get different answers. Are we answering the questions as archaeologists, textual critics, fundamentalists, or something else?

If we play at fundamentalist theology as a logic exercise, Moses is the one that wrote the whole thing down more than five hundred years after Noah's death. Furthermore, remember that according to the Bible, every Israelite that was actually in Egypt died in the desert (Num 14:20-24). When the Israelites entered Canaan, every eyewitness to any part of their slavery in Egypt was gone. Aside from any remembered stories they had from their elders while wandering in the Sinai, the only record of anything prior to the Exodus was written by Moses himself. Even according to a fundamentalist view of the Bible, then, our knowledge of Noah and the Flood is dependent on Moses being honest (we already know that he was the humblest man alive because he told us in Numbers 12:3). Not only can we not know if Noah was honest, but we only have Moses' word for it that he was even real.

Even with a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, there are still two more bottlenecks of the same sort after this one. The first is the "book of the covenant" that the priests of Yahweh found in the Temple during some renovations in 2 Kings 22:8. That was when Josiah went on a tear and wrecked all the other gods' stuff and then held what might have been the first Passover since the Israelites left Egypt:

And the king commanded all the people, saying, "Keep the Passover unto Yahweh your god, as it is written in this book of the covenant." Surely there was not kept such a Passover from the days of the judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah; but in the eighteenth year of king Josiah was this Passover.

Prior to this scroll's discovery, apparently nobody contemporary with Josiah knew that they were supposed to be monolatrous (stuff for Baal and Asherah was in the temples of Yahweh; were they really "Yahweh's" temple before this, or were they shared spaces?) or that they were supposed to have a Passover festival every year.

The second bottleneck is Ezra's set of scrolls that he brought back from Babylon (Nehemiah 8). At the very least, the Feast of Tabernacles had somehow been completely forgotten about before this point. Did Ezra add that? Did he maybe tweak Isaiah a little to give his foreign boss a bit of a shoutout? Seriously, read Isaiah 45 sometime. This is God gushing like a schoolgirl over a future ruler of the Persian Empire, which didn't exist yet:

Thus says Yahweh to his anointed [or Messiah!], Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him and remove the armor of kings, to open the doors before him and the gates cannot be closed: "I will go before you and make the rough places smooth. I will bend the brass gates and cut the iron bars. I will give you the treasures kept in the dark and hoards hidden in secret so that you may know that it is I, Yahweh, the god of Israel, who call you by your name!"

[JehovahsWitness]

Simple question.
Let's assume the Bible is a true account, but question things about it.

How do we know anything recorded before Noah is accurate?

If we assume the Bible is a true account why would we doubt Noah is accurate? He was after all, there! He woul know what he saw and experienced better than anyone (It seems likely regarding the flood that he kept a log of dates). Most people are capable of remembering the main events of their own life story, we call them autobiographies or memoires.


JW

[Zzyzx]

.

If we assume the Bible is a true account why would we doubt Noah is accurate? He was after all, there! He woul know what he saw and experienced better than anyone (It seems likely regarding the flood that he kept a log of dates).

Okay. Let's read what Noah wrote -- his account.

Kindly quote verbatim his words.

[Willum]

I am really confused by what is so difficult to understand about the topic.
Assuming there was a Noah.
How can on be sure his account was accurate?

How do we know that Satan, having made a colossal fool out of God at every other stage of the Genesis narrative, didn't replace the builder of the ark with his own man and family, who would be Noa, and re-write the creation story (so that God looked like a schmuck at each turn).

Or how do we know Noah, if he wasn't the Devil's own, got the story right?

Noah is quite simply a bottleneck in the Bible narrative. One person who defined all the Bible before that point.

Was he corrupt or vain?
Senile?

[Replying to post 7 by JehovahsWitness]

If we assume the Bible is a true account...

Why on God's green Earth would we make that assumption?

[Willum]

[Replying to post 5 by Elijah John]

Are you saying that since the flood story is clearly implausible that the Bible has no value or validity? If not, I'm not sure what you are getting at.

No, I am saying, since Noah, assuming he was a real person with an ark, since Noah is a bottle neck of Biblical history, had complete control over the Biblical narrative before this point, how do we know he got the story right, or if Satan wasn't able to corrupt him, or whatnot?