The Mesopotamian Flood Story

[theclassicist]

Thanks, hackenslash, I've never come across an actual debate on the matter, just lots of unrelated information the shows that there could not have been a world wide flood, let alone one about 4000 years ago. I'll be reading through that debate.

Same here.

[The Magic Pudding]

Mt Everast would have to have been submerged, after all we don't want any Nepalese escaping.
7000 metres divided by 40 days, that's 175 metres of rain each day.  
8,700 inches if you prefer.
I probably should knock off 5% for land above sea level, but still that's serious rain.

[Too Few Lions]

There's a reason why Flood myths exist from all over the world, even from places where flooding never occurred, and it's that the Flood myths are allegorical. They're to do with the movement of the stars in the heavens over long periods of time, maybe linked to the idea of the Great or Platonic Year. It may be that the ancients believed that this Great Year of the movement of the stars due to precession had a summer and a winter, just like our years. During the summer the world was cleansed or destroyed by a great conflagration, and during the winter by a great flood. All people share the night sky, hence the same allegorical myth could be found in places where floods didn't historically occur.

Although the earliest flood myths known are from Mesopotamia, the Greek variants are very useful for decoding the myth. The two main Greek flood myths were that of Deucalion (very similar to the Noah account) and Atlantis (the flood myth created by Plato). I always wonder why people try to find a historical basis for Atlantis (like the eruption of Thera) as Plato makes it clear the story is allegorical / mythological, and not historical. He clearly mentions the cycle of Flood and Conflagration;

‘There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water…Your story of how Phaethon, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burnt up things on the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on the earth…on the other hand the gods purge the earth with a deluge.’

The 2nd Century philosopher Celsus also mentioned this cycle in his brilliant critique of Christianity called 'On the True Doctrine' (which should be compulsory reading for all atheists) when talking about the Christians belief in the Second Coming / Final Judgement;

'They postulate, for example, that their Messiah will return as a conqueror on the clouds, and that he will rain fire upon the earth in his battle with the princes of the air, and that the whole world, with the exception of Christians, will be consumed with fire. An interesting idea â€" and hardly an original one. The idea came from the Greeks and others â€" namely, that after cycles of years and because of the fortuitous conjunctions of certain stars there are conflagrations and floods, and that after the last flood, in the time of Deucalion, the cycle demands a conflagration in accordance with the alternating succession of the universe. This is responsible for the silly opinion of some Christians that God will come down and rain fire upon the earth.’

The cycle of Flood and Conflagration is also mentioned in the Corpus Hermeticum;

‘God the creator, when he looked upon the things that happened, established his design, which is good, against the disorder. Sometimes he submerged it in a great flood, at other times he burned it in a searing fire.’

I'm really amazed that people still try to explain the Flood by looking for an actual historical event. It seems the modern mind isn't imaginative enough to think in terms of mythology and allegory!

[Gawen]

Reprinted here for your viewing pleasure...from the Noah's Ark sticky in this forum.

Written by Marty Leipzig:

First - the global flood supposedly (Scripturally) covered the planet and Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall. The diameter of the Earth at the equator, on the other hand, is 12,756.8 km. All we have to do is calculate the volume of water to fill a sphere with a radius of the Earth plus Mount Everest; then we subtract the volume of a sphere with a radius of the Earth. Now, I know this won't yield a perfect result, because the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, but it will serve to give a general idea about the amounts involved.

So, here are the calculations:

First, Everest:

V = 4/3×pi×r3
= 4/3×pi×6387.248 km3
= 1.09151×1012 km3

Now, the Earth at sea level:

V = 4/3×pi×r3
= 4/3×pi×6378.4 km3
= 1.08698×1012 km3

The difference between these two figures is the amount of water needed to just cover the Earth: 4.525×109 Or, to put into a more sensible number, 4,525,000,000,000 cubic kilometres. This is one helluva lot of water.
For those who think it might come from the polar ice caps, please don't forget that water is more dense than ice, and thus that the volume of ice present in those ice caps would have to be more than the volume of water necessary. Some interesting physical effects of all that water, too. How much weight do you
think that is? Well, water at STP weighs in at 1 gram/cubic centimetre (by definition), so:

4.525×109 km3 of water,
×109 (cubic meters in a cubic kilometer),
×106 (cubic centimetres in a cubic meter),
×1 g/cm3 (denisty of water),
×10-3 (kilograms),
(turn the crank)
equals 4.525×1021 kg

Ever wonder what the effects of that much weight would be? Well, many times in the near past (i.e., the Pleistocene), continental ice sheets covered many of the northern states and most all of Canada. For the sake of argument, let's say the area covered by the Wisconsinian advance (the latest and greatest) was
10,000,000,000 (ten million) km2, by an average thickness of 1 km of ice (a good estimate... it was thicker in some areas [the zones of accumulation] and much thinner elsewhere [at the ablating edges]).

Now, 1.00×107 km2 times 1 km thickness equals 1.00×107 km3 of ice.

Now, remember earlier that we noted that it would take 4.525×109 km3 of water for the Flood? Well, looking at the Wisconsinian glaciation, all that ice (which is frozen water, remember?) would be precisely 0.222% [...do the math] (that's zero decimal two hundred twenty two thousandths) percent of the water
needed for the flood.

Well, the Wisconsinian glacial stade ended about 25,000 YBP (years before present), as compared for the approximately supposedly 4,000 YBP flood event.

Due to these late Pleistocene glaciations (some 21,000 years preceding the supposed flood), the mass of the ice has actually depressed the crust of the Earth. That crust, now that the ice is gone, is slowly rising (called glacial rebound); an this rebound can be measured, in places (like northern Wisconsin), in centimetres- per-year. Sea level was also lowered some tens of meters due to the very finite amount of water in the Earth's hydrosphere being locked up in glacial ice sheets (geologists call this glacioeustacy).

Now, glacial rebound can only be measured, obviously, in glaciated terranes, i.e., the Sahara is not rebounding as it was not glaciated during the Pleistocene. This lack of rebound is noted by laser ranged interferometery and satellite geodesy [so there], as well as by geomorphology. Glacial striae on bedrock, eskers, tills, moraines, rouche moutenees, drumlins, kame and kettle topography, fjords, deranged
fluvial drainage and erratic blocks all betray a glacier's passage. Needless to say, these geomorphological expressions are not found everywhere on Earth (for instance, like the Sahara). Therefore, although extensive, the glaciers were a local (not global) is scale. Yet, at only 0.222% the size of the supposed flood, they have had a PROFOUND and EASILY recognisable and measurable effects on the lands.

Yet, the supposed flood of Noah, supposedly global in extent, supposedly much more recent, and supposedly orders of magnitude larger in scale; has exactly zero measurable effects and zero evidence for it's occurrence.

Golly, Wally. I wonder why that may be...?

Further, Mount Everest extends through 2/3 of the Earth's atmosphere. Since two
forms of matter can't occupy the same space, we have an additional problem with the
atmosphere. Its current boundary marks the point at which gasses of the atmosphere
can escape the Earth's gravitational field. Even allowing for partial dissolving of
the atmosphere into our huge ocean, we'd lose the vast majority of our atmosphere
as it is raised some 5.155 km higher by the rising flood waters; and it boils off
into space.

Yet, we still have a quite thick and nicely breathable atmosphere. In fact, ice
cores from Antarctica (as well as deep-sea sediment cores) which can be
geochemically tested for paleoatmospheric constituents and relative gas ratios; and
these records extend well back into the Pleistocene, far more than the supposed
4,000 YBP flood event. Strange that this major loss of atmosphere, atmospheric
fractionation (lighter gasses - oxygen, nitrogen, fluorine, neon, etc. - would
have boiled off first in the flood-water rising scenario, enriching what remained
with heavier gasses - argon, krypton, xenon, radon, etc.), and massive
extinctions from such global upheavals are totally unevidenced in these cores.

Even further, let us take a realistic and dispassionate look at the other claims
relating to global flooding and other such biblical nonsense.

Particularly, in order to flood the Earth to the Genesis requisite depth of 10
cubits (~15' or 5 m.) above the summit of Mt. Ararat (16,900' or 5,151 m AMSL), it
would obviously require a water depth of 16,915' (5,155.7 m), or over three miles
above mean sea level. In order to accomplish this little task, it would require
the previously noted additional 4.525×109 km3 of water to flood the Earth to this
depth. The Earth's present hydrosphere (the sum total of all waters in, on and
above the Earth) totals only 1.37×109 km3. Where would this additional
4.525×109 km3 of water come from? It cannot come from water vapour (i.e., clouds)
because the atmospheric pressure would be 840 times greater than standard pressure
of the atmosphere today. Further, the latent heat released when the vapour
condenses into liquid water would be enough to raise the temperature of the
Earth's atmosphere to approximately 3,570 C (6,460 F).

Someone, who shall properly remain anonymous, suggested that all the water needed
to flood the Earth existed as liquid water surrounding the globe (i.e., a "vapour
canopy"). This, of course, is staggeringly stupid. What is keeping that much water
from falling to the Earth? There is a little property called gravity that would
cause it to fall.

Let's look into that from a physical standpoint. To flood the Earth, we have
already seen that it would require 4.525×109 km3 of water with a mass of
4.525×1021 kg. When this amount of water is floating about the Earth's
surface, it stored an enormous amount of potential energy, which is converted to
kinetic energy when it falls, which, in turn, is converted to heat upon impact
with the Earth. The amount of heat released is immense:

Potential energy: E=MgH, where
M = mass of water,
g = gravitational constant and,
H = height of water above surface.

Now, going with the Genesis version of the Noachian Deluge as lasting 40 days and
nights, the amount of mass falling to Earth each day is 4.525×1021 kg/40 24-hr.
periods. This equals 1.10675×1020 kilograms daily. Using H as 10 miles (16,000
meters), the energy released each day is 1.73584×1025 joules. The amount of energy
the Earth would have to radiate per m2/sec is energy divided by surface area of the
Earth times number of seconds in one day. That is:

e = 1.735384×1025/(4×3.14159×((63862)×86,400))
e = 391,935.0958 j/m2/s

Currently, the Earth radiates energy at the rate of approximately 215 joules/m2/sec
and the average temperature is 280 K. Using the Stefan-Boltzman 4th-Power Law to
calculate the increase in temperature:

E (increase)/E (normal) = T (increase)/T4 (normal)

E (normal) = 215
E (increase) = 391,935.0958
T (normal) = 280.

Turn the crank, and T (increase) equals 1,800 K.

The temperature would thusly rise 1,800 K, or 1,526.84 C (that's 2,780.33 F...
lead melts at 880 F...). It would be highly unlikely that anything short of fused
quartz would survive such an onslaught. Also, the water level would have to rise
at an average rate of 5.5 inches/min; and in 13 minutes would be in excess of six
feet deep.

Finally, at 1800 K water would not exist as liquid.

It is quite clear that a Biblical Flood is and was quite impossible.

[Voter]

Personally I find it pointless to try to fit a supernatural event into natural terms, but if you're going to try, at least think it through a little better. For instance:

First - the global flood supposedly (Scripturally) covered the planet and Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall.

The true first is to consider whether Mt. Everest existed, and at its current height, prior to the flood in a Biblical model. The height of mountains and depth of the oceans before, during and after the flood could change your calculations drastically.

Again, I don't really see the point, but if you're gonna do it, do it right.

[Asmodean]

Personally I find it pointless to try to fit a supernatural event into natural terms, but if you're going to try, at least think it through a little better. For instance:

First - the global flood supposedly (Scripturally) covered the planet and Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall.

The true first is to consider whether Mt. Everest existed, and at its current height, prior to the flood in a Biblical model. The height of mountains and depth of the oceans before, during and after the flood could change your calculations drastically.

Again, I don't really see the point, but if you're gonna do it, do it right.

Oh, Everest was very much present 4-5000 years ago. The imperfections of the model presented are far below the margin of error with regard to the possibility of a global flood. Even if Everest was shorter, the Biblical flood would still be impossible.