Babylonian tale of round ark draws ire from some Christian circles

[SecularMotion]

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia is putting a new spin on the biblical tale of the flood and Noah's Ark — and that's causing consternation among some Christian fundamentalists.

The Book of Genesis includes detailed specifications for the giant boat on which all kinds of animals were placed, two by two, to shelter from 40 days and 40 nights of rain. The wooden ark was to measure about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 30 feet high (300 by 50 by 30 cubits, or 137 by 23 by 13 meters).

All well and good: But the specifications listed on the Babylonian "Ark Tablet," which is now on display at the British Museum, are totally different. The Babylonian boat was supposed to be made of braided rope, stiffened by wooden spars and sealed with bitumen. And it was supposed to have a round base, measuring 230 feet wide (70 meters wide).

"It was really a heart-stopping moment — the discovery that the boat was to be a round boat," Irving Finkel, a curator at the museum, told The Associated Press. "That was a real surprise."

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/babylonian-tale-round-ark-draws-wrath-some-christian-circles-2D12035655

[cleanhippie]

1. What's so surprising about the bible being wrong, again?

Perhaps the surprise is felt most by those that have been indoctrinated into believing in its veracity only to find they have been duped.

[rug]

2. Maybe it's an arc after all.

[Igel]

3. It's similar to another strange claim.

Fundies: "They say we're descended from chimps."

Intelligent response: "No, we say that we and chimps are descended from a common ancestor."

The one guy is insistent that in spite of bits of Tanakh from 7, 8, 9, 10 centuries BC anything that could have been borrowed from the oldest source must have been borrowed from the oldest source.

Let's look at something completely different: Languages. There are a bunch of features of Slavic that it shares with Baltic languages. For a while the claim was that Slavic borrowed them from Baltic. It suited the Baltic linguists to make the claim; it suited the Germanic linguists to accept it. The Balts were resentful of the Slavs; the Germans were condescending to the Slavs.

Overlooked was that Baltic and Slavic were conservative, and both preserved a lot of late Proto-Indo-European features. Overlooked was that they were adjacent and had pretty much always been adjacent, and that innovations could easily spread from one closely-related language to another if they were in close contact.

In other words, three things might have happened: shared archaisms, shared innovations, or borrowing. Politically and ideologically "borrowing" was the preferred answer. Problem was most of the similarities were also archaisms, shared; and the "borrowings" didn't extend to all Baltic or Slavic languages, but to Baltic and Slavic languages that were adjacent not in the last 1500 years but to those adjacent 500-1000 BC or before. In other words--shared innovations.

So the ark-story could have been borrowed late. Or it could be a shared innovation. Or a shared archaism. There's a push to insist that nothing in the Tanakh can date to before the captivity (just as there was a push to say that the captivity was really a trivial thing--not the same groups, of course, but each "push" fits the general ideology or politics of the scholars involved). It's a Big Claim to say, "borrowing." It's trivial to say "shared archaism."

The result has been to say that only two or three Semitic tribes actually had any rites, rituals, narratives, tales, or traditions. Which is funny on the face of it, since when the Semitic peoples arrived to swamp the Sumerians they arrived with their own tales and tradtions. It's again like in Slavic--there's a cottage industry, and has been for a long time, of pointing out where Roman Jakobson was wrong. That he was far more right than wrong is overlooked. Except with the Tanakh it's more political yet.

[struggle4progress]

4. Anybody who wants to spend $30 million poking Ham in the eye has a chance now

If he doesn't come up with that by Wednesday, Ham faces a recall of the unsecured municipal bonds sold to finance the ark park

So if you've got the cash, you could offer it Ham under the contractual condition that the ark park must "teach the controversy" and so must build a giant circular bitumeniz-drenched rope coil boat replica at the site -- because you certainly don't want to promote heretical thoughts of a big streamlined logcabin if people should actually imagine a huge floating basket

[LongTomH]

5. A lot of ancient cultures were located on flood plains

The yearly flooding was what kept the land fertile. Many of those will have legends of an all-destroying flood and a few 'righteous' survivors.

[Act_of_Reparation]

6. The similarities are too many to be explained away so superficially

The flood narrative and the Epic of Gilgamesh do not simply share a similar premise, they share a similar narrative -- the only differences being the main characters and the deities involved. And it goes well beyond that. The flood is only one story of many that appear to have been lifted from Babylonian mythology. There is also the creation narrative, which is almost word-for-word a copy of the Enuma Elis; and the story of Cain and Abel, which bears striking similarity to the Sumerian tale of Emesh and Enten.

It's fairly clear the ancient Hebrews lifted these stories from the Babylonians; that the Book of Genesis, as we know it, was compiled during the Hebrews' exile to Babylon makes it all but certain.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

7. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh

As stated in my copy of James Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (2nd edition, 1955), the ark of The Preserver of Life, called "The Preserver of Life" was a six-story cube about 200 feet in length, width and height.

IOW, this sort of thing is not new.

[Iggo]

8. My fictional ark is greater than your fictional ark!