DA Morgan posted:
Actually no. That is not why we disagree with it. We disagree with it because we have read the Epic of Gilgamesh and we know it is just a bad plagiarism of the original work.

Plageriarism? How do you figure?

I see it this way...Gilgamesh called for a cube shape ark...the bible calls for a more rectangle shape box...that has excellent properties for staying up-right, unlike a cube.

So the question is...how did the original writer of Genesis know the excellent principles behind the ark? You guys claim they were pretty ignorant concerning ship building, so, how did they get it right? Did they guess?

To be honest it sounds like the Gilgamesh story ripped off the Genesis story.

Ah-ha-ha! You do have a sense of humor, trilobyte.

"So the question is...how did the original writer of Genesis know the excellent principles behind the ark? You guys claim they were pretty ignorant concerning ship building, so, how did they get it right? Did they guess?"

No scientific evidence of this whatever. All we have are assertions from religions fanatics. So there are fish all over the world that require a special degree of salinity. When the world flooded, did all the salt water fish suddenly become fresh water fish, or vice versa? Answer? it obviously never happened.

"To be honest it sounds like the Gilgamesh story ripped off the Genesis story."
Well ... except for the fact that the Gilgamesh story is a LOT older!

For those that want to get a really good picture of the deck Trilobyte deals from here, again, is what he wrote:
"Gilgamesh called for a cube shape ark"

Here is what is actually written on the 7th Tablet of the Epic.

"Seventy-two cubits was your height, 14 cubits your width, one cubit your thickness"

I guess where trolls come from 72x14x1 are the dimensions of a cube. But that is certainly not what I was taught in elementary school.

Want to read it yourself?
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab7.htm

I read your linked text, and it appears to me that he is referring to a door that is 72 x 14 x1 cubit. He's saying he made this door.

"The Ark story told in Genesis has parallels in the Sumerian myth of Ziusudra, which tells how a carpenter was warned by God to build a vessel in which to escape a flood sent by Him. Less exact parallels are found in other cultures from around the world. Indeed, the deluge story is one of the most common topics across the globe, leading both skeptics and believers to see this trend as proof of their position."

Pointless arguing over this one.

Believer: They are all different reports of the same event. The fact that so many different cultures report it, leads one to assume there is some truth in the event.

Skeptic: The writer of Genesis just copied it - commandeering an old myth for his own purposes.

Blacknad.

Not possible Rose for several reasons. The primary one being that a door opening only has two dimensions.

But you might, also, want to do the math.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubit

The Biblical ark dimensions were 300x50x30 cubits (Genesis 6:15) which is about 140x23x13.5 metres or 459x75x44 feet, so its volume was 43,500 m3 (cubic metres) or 1.54 million cubic feet.

These dimensions provided optimal stability and would allow it to list up to 60 degrees and still right itself.

The Gilgamesh ark dimensions were 120L x120B x 120D cubits.

This would topple very easily.

Assuming what they told me in school was right, then the Gilgamesh ark was definitely a CUBE.

Blacknad.

Dan,

You have a habit of posting links that you don't read properly.

From your link:

"Enkidu raised his eyes,...and spoke to the door as if it were human:
" You stupid wooden door ,
with no ability to understand... !
Already at 10 leagues I selected the wood for you,
until I saw the towering Cedar ...
Your wood was without compare in my eyes.
Seventy-two cubits was your height, 14 cubits your width, one
cubit your thickness,
your door post, pivot stone, and post cap ..."


OR:


Assuming you are right and they are not the dimensions for the door but are indeed for the ark then at:

"Seventy-two cubits was your height, 14 cubits your width, one cubit your thickness"...

Then the ark was only (assuming we are using the Summerian cubit from your wiki-link) 20.4 inches wide. Or we could go with the Egyptian cubit and say the ark was 20.63" wide.


Or we could just read the Gilgamesh passage correctly and realise that he was just writing about a huge door.

Blacknad.

Dan, your main mistake here was to include these five words:

"Want to read it yourself?"


Right, now do we get to coax an admission from you that you were actually mistaken? Come on, you can do it ;-)

Blacknad.

Obviously I misread something but where are you finding the 120 number with respect to the size?

The closest I can find is a reference such as this:

"To do this, Gilgamesh fashions 120 beams, 60 cubits long"

Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A446410

and this:

" Urshanabi told Gilgamesh to get 120 logs to push them through the water"

Source:
http://www.geocities.com/trpjwig/mideast/gilgamesh.html

DA:

Amaranth is right. It is a door he beholds.

Thank you for the great link, however. I find the Indian stuff very entertaining and more informative than one might expect.
jjw

The bottom line is this...why is the ark mentioned in Genesis so "just right" ... while Gilgamesh not?

It sounds like Gilgamesh was ripped off from Genesis. Not the other way around.

"The bottom line is this...why is the ark mentioned in Genesis so "just right" ... while Gilgamesh not? "
More time to think it through? It's not clear that it's so "just right." There's no scientific basis for the belief.

jjw wrote:
"I find the Indian stuff very entertaining"

I do too. But Gilgamesh, most likely a real person, was Sumarian.

A typical 19,000 tonne cargo ship has a breadth/depth ratio of 1.7.

The Biblical ark (22,000 tonnes - assuming a density of 0.4) has a B/D rating of 1.67.

These are ideal ocean going dimensions, which makes it a fortuitous guess, or shows a knowledge of ship-building.

Blacknad.

Dan,

"According to the version of the Deluge story contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh (Tablet XI) the Ark is a cube with an edge of 120 cubits."

http://www.metrum.org/deluge/delgilg.htm


It derives from:

Gilgamesh XI,line 58 the length is said to be ten ninda (a ninda was a dozen cubits). Therefore 120 cubits long. And in XI, line 57 it reads "120 cubits each I raised its walls".

Blacknad.

They have done test on models with the same size ratio as the ark....and they do quite well.....So there is a scientific basics for this belief. (but you can continue to tell yourself there isn't if you would lke too)


But back to the original question.....If Genesis ripped off Gilgamesh, then how did a bunch of ignorant ancients who never built an ark get perfect dimensions for their story?

Why not stick with the cube shape of Gilgamesh?

I think the answer is, is that Genesis is the original.

Yes, the Genesis account must be the original. After all, it's a thousand or two years younger than Gilgamesh, so...

Wait. That doesn't sound right. Well, we KNOW the Bible's flood story is the original. That's established, right? So then this extra millenium or two that the Gilgamesh story has on the Bible story can be ignored by a simple hand wave. That's from the time honored creation science Law of Pre-Ordained Conclusions.

Care to prove that last statement?

Blacknad wrote:
"These are ideal ocean going dimensions"

On the other hand this is all totally irrelevant as in either case, biblical or Sumerian, they were protected by the appropriate hand of god and could have just as easily sailed a lead brick out into the storm.

Surely no one would claim their god couldn't make a lead brick float.

Trollobyte asks:
"Care to prove that last statement?"

Sure:
"The earliest Sumerian versions of the epic date from as early as the Third dynasty of Ur (2100 BC-2000 BC)."
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

and

According to historians, the Old Testament was composed between the 5th century BC and the 2nd century BC.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Testament

Do the math. If you need help with it just ask.

Now there's a toughy. Gilgamesh:

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/MESO/GILG.HTM
http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/
http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/eng251/gilgameshstudy.htm
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/clubmed/gilgamsh.html

The Old Testament:
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab85
exerpt:
"The books of the Jewish Bible are believed to have been written over several centuries, beginning in the 10th century BC - by which time the Hebrews are settled in Canaan, or Palestine. But in many parts the scribes are writing down a much older oral tradition. It is thought that some of the events described may go back as far as the 18th century BC."

The Sumerian account of the flood (one of 500+ flood legends known to exist) was committed to a written form long before the Genesis account (as far as we know). Although the Yahvist text (one text from which the Pentateuch was compiled) was as early as 9 or 10 BC.

This doesn't mean that the Sumerian text was the first flood version to be formulated. The version in the Pentateuch was likely passed down by word of mouth for generations before it was compiled by the writer(s) of Genesis.

There can be no real debate here as the evidence is inconclusive. Scholars cannot say with certainty which version came into being first, only which version was recorded first. And then can only go as far as saying that it is 'as far as we are aware'.

Blacknad.

DA thank you for noticing.

They seem to me to overlap.
Possibly due to mixing sources of the stories.
jjw

Blacknad has it right.....the date in which something is written down doesn't mean it is older or younger. All it means is that it was written down first.

now, back to you my evo friends.

So, when will you evos address the original question? Is it to tough for you that you need to change the topic?

How did a bunch of ignorant ancients get the shape right in Genesis?

We put on a science night for the K12 students in my city. The main contest to design a foil boat that could hold the most pennies. The students very easily were able to experimentally determine that the optimal shape was a barge. The winner was 12 years old.

Are there any actual scientists who confirm this fellow's findings? Have there been any studies that would show such an arc would be big enough to hold two of every animal and their food? Have there been studies to show how much work would be required to keep the place free of feces?

have there been any studies that would show such an arc would be big enough to hold two of every animal and their food?

YES

Are you claiming that it would have been impossible?

Trilobyte, to say the Hebrews were ignorant of boating is to misread your Bible. I think it was the tribe Dan (could have been Asher) who were too busy with their ships to join one of the many invasions the tribes indulged in. Many historians believe Dan are the Danaan of Homer and the Denyen Sea People. They would certainly have known a great deal about sea-faring.

I read a penguin book "Mesopotamia, the Invention of the City" a few years ago. The author claims that both myth and archeology show the first temple in the region was at Eridu. It's built on a slight rise above the plain and fish were eaten at ritual meals. Sounds to me survivors of a regional flood gave thanks for many years. Probably the origin of the Bible story about Noah.

I'll agree that our ancient ancestors were ignorant of modern science. I'll disagree that they were ignorant of seafaring. See:

http://ina.tamu.edu/

trilobyte wrote:
"Blacknad has it right.....the date in which something is written down doesn't mean it is older or younger. All it means is that it was written down first."

While Blacknad is literally correct he is, in fact, completely wrong. Here's why:

Take a tradition that has been passed down through written text. Lets say, for example, the Ten Commandments or the story of George Washington's life. We know, for a fact, that errors, large errors, have crept in.

Now look at a story, any story, passed down solely as oral tradition. What are the chances of it remaining accurate for 100 days? 100 months? 100 years? 100 generations? Absolutely zero!

Thus the first story to be written down is, by definition, the most likely to be accurate. And the first story to be written down, by definition, was the product of the better educated people more likely to care about accuracy.

The story in Genesis is a plagiarized fabrication of a Sumerian epic. At the time of Sumerian culture the story of Abraham/Ibrahim didn't even exist. And may feel free to confirm this with the Jewish Rabbi of your choice. It is, after all, their religion, their tradition, and their language.

TFF.

The first part:

A 12 year old has already seen a barge and has the benefit of a modern education to equip him/her with tools to accomplish the job of experimenting to find the best shape. By all accounts the Sumerians didn't have such tools and weren't able to work out that a giant cube would be unworkable.

It's not a fair parallel.

The second part:

There have been feasibility studies to find out if the ark was workable and whether it could contain enough animals to do the job.

http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/ark/index.htm

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/sizeark.html

Blacknad.

The 12 year olds have seen barges and they have seen ships and boats. The only way they know that a barge is the correct solution is experiment which I witnessed them doing. They figure this out after very few tries.

The 12 year olds have seen barges and they have seen ships and boats. The only way they know that a barge is the correct solution is experiment which I witnessed them doing. They figure this out after very few tries.

Of course a barge is not the correct solution to the arc problem, but it, too, is amenable to simple experiment.

Also, he fit ALL the different kinds of species on the boat? How did he get them all? Penguins? Sloths? Koalas? Kangaroos? Several kinds of Mambas? Gila monsters? coral snakes? Even assuming that no starving peasants would have killed and ate them, how did they get all the way over to the ark? and then how did they get back? LLamas? All the bugs? polar bears? All the fresh water fish (so they wouldn't die in the salt water)? Yes, the ark, were it not a myth would be large, but I wonder if he would actually have been able to construct it. Saying is one thing, actually doing it is quite a different matter.

Even if it weren't a myth, how could all the animals get there, let alone fit?

Arguing about what design would or would not be most seaworthy is a bit ridiculous.

First off no boat is capable of holding two-each, one male and one female of all of the non-oceanic lifeforms on the planet ... not even the largest aircraft carrier ever built.

All the fresh-water fish in fresh water.
All the food required.
All the fresh water for drinking, etc.
And please don't try to tell me they captured that fresh water using tarps or some other such nonsense.
Enough to last for 40+ days.
So if you take the attitude that it happened, and the T Rex didn't eat the sheep then you have to also posit more than a few miracles.

Once you get into the miracle game then you might as well accept that given a miracle even a lead brick can float.

So lets have a reality check. Either the story is preposterous on its face or there had to be a continuing miracle.

And anyone wishing to volunteer to take two monitor lizards from Turkey to Indonesia ... and two Hyenas from Turkey to Africa can be my guest.

He collected them? Sure.
He took them back too? Right.
Just add in another blinkin' miracle.

Hi DA:

I am concerned that if my imagination was as compressed as you seem to project I would have a constant headache.

What is your best estimate of how far back human history may extend?
jjw

This is as good a source as any I can find on the web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_history

Roughly 8,000 years.

Sounds reasonable.

However we are on two entirely different tours.
jjw

heres a question about the two of every kind.

given the known state of technology, how did he find a place for penguins and polar bears. they have to have cold to survive. how did he find a place near them for animals that require the heat.

Just another miracle don't you know.

Anything can be explained by just claiming it is a miracle.

Why didn't the T Rex eat the sheep?
Why didn't the Tuberculosis infect the humans?
Why didn't the cats eat the birds?
What did they do with all that dung?
How did hippos get to Turkey?
Or Canadian polar bears?

Just another miracle.

Well with the polar bears we know it was air-conditioned 747s but the rest ... all miracles.

If we give the source every benefit of the doubt and consider how could we duplicate the Noah trip we would not collect actual animals we would find a "all-purpose-womb" and take the DNA of all the animals we wanted to clone and reproduce them later. Any way careful reading will show Noah did not take two of everything.

I have always wondered about the mountains 15 cubits high covered with water. Where did all that water go? Things are not always what they seem. Does it matter if the story is true or even intended to be accurate?
jjw

during the time of noah, no one had any clue about dna existance, let alone cloning. A carefull reading of that indicated that he had to have, because there was no way for the diverstity of the animal kingdom without it. he would have had to take every subspecies as well.

No, he took two of each "kind." The definition of kind varies, depending on the point the creation ~scientist~ is attempting to make.

Also, he took SEVEN of each clean animal. I don't know what that means, but I'd guess the un-Kosher ones didn't make the grade.

Stories grow. I'd presume the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah etc. are oral memories of the same event. Almost certainly a flood on the Mesopotamian plain. A farmer may have collected his family, a couple of his goats and a donkey and floated until he reached higher ground. Legend and archaeology suggest this was Eridu. They caught fish to survive for a few days and everyone knows about fishermen.

Any explanation invoking modern scientific knowledge to explain how some ancient farmer managed to rescue every living thing from a worldwide flood involves putting the cart before the horse.

Did all these guys go on a creationst golf retreat together?

DA Morgan. You suggested history has been going "Roughly 8,000 years". I pretty sure the definition of history is that it is based on writing. Writing didn't really begin until about 6000 years ago and was at that time mostly chartered accountancy type writing. Anything remotely resembling sources that can be used for history don't exist until about 2000 years after that, about 2000 BC. Of course writing didn't reach some cultures until 200 years ago. Oral tradition in those regions does preserve relatively recent events and these stories can be treated as history but stories older than about 200 years become totally garbled and unreliable.

The definition of "writing" is a bit subject to definition. In a pictographic world, one you should be familiar with, given the indigenous Maori population, cave paintings are a form of writing.

I think there is room for reasonable people to debate what they choose as that point in time. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other.

Hiya Terry,

Do you have any examples, or a reliable source for this? Cheers.

Blacknad.

Blacknad. I haven't read anything on the subject lately but years ago research on New Zealand Maori traditions relating to memories of European visits and events known from archaeology showed that 200 years was maximum for reliable recollection. That's about six generations. I'll try to find some recent research.

DA. I was merely pointing out that if Gilgamesh's flood occurred even 4000 BC the earliest written record of it dates to probably 2000 years later. I agree carvings and cave paintings provide some record of historical events but groups of people tend to get pushed around over time. Often people living in a region have no idea about the origin or meaning of such records.

sorry Blacknad, I?m running out of time. The only one I?ve found yet is Wikipedia entry on "historical method".

?Elsewhere, Garraghan suggests a maximum limit of 150 years, at least in cultures that excel in oral remembrance?. From a book ?A Guide to Hitorical Method? evidently.

Cheers Terry.

Blacknad.