[i67vw3]

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

[Tuna-Fish]

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.

[Zancarius]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

>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

[cryptonector]

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]

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..

[rnhmjoj]

There's also the omnipresent story of the thunder-god that defeats the huge snake/dragon. Here's a summary of all the variations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#European_stories/record...

[Zancarius]

Guess what's a central thesis that's not immediately obvious in the biblical account? Leviathan. In Isaiah 27:1, Leviathan is destroyed, and the adjectives used to describe this creature are the same cognates from the Ugaritic that describe Litanu/Tiamat.

There's no accident in my mind that in Revelation, the beast that rises up from the sea has 7 heads, because that's how Leviathan/Litanu was traditionally pictured in the Semitic cultures of the day (7 heads). Psalm 74 uses the plural for "heads" when speaking on Yahweh crushing them, though it never numbers them. Likely the imagery was a common cultural motif, so the numbering wasn't necessary for the readers to understand.

Leviathan likely represents a northwest Semitic chaos deity in opposition to Yahweh and is more or less the embodiment of evil that is destroyed in the eschaton, but this is probably speculative. I think there are strong arguments in favor of it, however.

[empath-nirvana]

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]

'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]

> 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

[Tuna-Fish]

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.

[darkwater]

And it really boggles my mind that with all these evidences, people still think that supernatural stories based on the OT myths are real...