Noah's flood: What happened to all the other people who knew how to make boats? [Spirituality & Religion]
Like none of them managed to float on a boat with supplies? Seems like it'd be a lot easier for a couple or a family to survive with 40 days of supplies if you weren't filling your boat with all the animals.
What do you reckon?
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Well, part of the point of the first part of the story is that God told Noah, who believed Him, that this would happen, and planned & acted accordingly.
Tools being what they were, one does not merely knock out a boat in short order, and, even with rain, you can imagine that months of laughing at the village idiot for making a huge-ass boat, you would be inclined to think "it's just rain" until it is far to late to do that.
But a reasonable question, and interacting with a text is important...learning is not a spectator sport.
@Pikachu Not too many boats inland. And if you think about coast-hugging boats of early peoples, probably not made for a storm which looked like a global catastrophe...but this isn't *their* journal about what *they* saw & experienced & how *they* interacted with God as *they* saw Him/Her/It/Them, right? At root, this is mostly the collection of stories about how Abram & _his_ descendants interacted with God over time, Scripture, proper (the "Old Testament"), modulo many prunings of focus (not all branches of his family are treated equally). If Moses _is_ the collector/transcriber & editor of the pentateuch (first five books of the Bible), then this story would have been something he presumably grew up with, etc.
Well yeah, i don't think the Noachian flood actually was a flood that drowned the whole world. The physical evidence simply doesn't support that. I'm just working in fiction here.
It seems crazy that no other boats or groups of boats in the world managed to survive.
@Pikachu I think it looked global to people where Noah was, but, again, you are trying to argue that boat tech was either already amazing or was such that people were primed to come up with amazing boats somewhat on the spur of the moment.
If you had the sorts of boats used on the Nile in ancient times, for instance, do you think that they would withstand a flood of 40 days' rain, and oceanlike conditions? Hugging the coast in the Mediterranean isn't like going beyond the "pillars of Heracles" into the big, wide ocean...why do you think there wasn't all kinds of info about what was beyond there?
@SomeMichGuy Funny thing is, apparently it took Noah 120+ years to build his Ark so it's not like a few months, it wold have been Generations laughing at him...
[quote], you are trying to argue that boat tech was either already amazing or was such that people were primed to come up with amazing boats [/quote]
Nah. I'm arguing that if the entire world was flooded (which obviously it was not) then it seems crazy that some other people somewhere would not have managed to survive with the boats that they had.
If animals can manage to raft across oceans on a scrap of wood i think some humans could manage to survive with boats.
@Pikachu Yeah, you are trying to say that boats *of a time coeval with the flood*, or rafts, could survive a catastrophe like that.
It is akin to saying that, since water always runs downhill, why is a certain home, etc., having leaks? Often, because the simple picture in the mind is true...but only as far as it goes. Water gets driven by wind into every corner, nook, & cranny, so any improperly flashed, waterproofed, etc., place can leak.
The notion that SOME rafts have survived SOME oceans is looking at it as though we are talking about the calm part of [i]Joe v. The Volcano,[/i] where he has at most a slight uptick in the breeze to upset his portable putting set...not the storm which led to him having to create his makeshift raft.
Yeah. I am saying that some boats would probably survive. Or groups of boats.
[quote]The notion that SOME rafts have survived SOME oceans [/quote]
Well there i'm not even talking about rafts. I'm talking about the fact that animals are able to cross oceans and colonize new areas by clinging to scraps floating across the ocean.
If a monkey can survive an ocean voyage on a log, surely SOME humans SOMWHERE other than Noah and his family would survive on actual boats.
@Pikachu Again, arguing that SOME animals have SOMETIMES done this is not proof of your claim.
You have a conjecture which you consider to be plausible, but I think you are being incredibly naïve.
Just look at what happens to MODERN boats when they are subjected to sudden hurricanes, tsunamis, etc., even when at modern harbors. They look like flotsam & jetsam...
Consider boat tech coeval with Noah...not fiberglas, not metal...the strength of materials, etc., was very different. No, I am not making the mistake so often made that ancient peoples were idiots; your point about ppl being resourceful problem-solvers, [b][i]within the constraints they have,[/i][/b] is truly amazing. And yes, you can point to examples of things we don't understand about ancient peoples.
But the emphasized phrase is something you seem to be glossing over...
And, in the story, the rest of the people weren't followers of the God who was to become the God of Abraham, didn't listen, etc.
So--within the sphere of the story--all could have been destroyed.
You make points the story doesn't address/is silent about. Sure, people not part of the flood in the part of the world involved in that story would have had fewer effects the further they were, but the original query was about the content of the story, not the content of alternate stories, all stories, etc.
Yup. That's that argument i'm making. I'm not pretending it's proof. Just saying that i find it unlikely given what we can observe in the real world that no other humans would survive.
I mean don't pretend you're bringing proof either, right? All you're saying is that it would have been incredibly taxing circumstances which i don't doubt. The odds of survival are low....but so are the odds of rats traveling across oceans on a scrap of wood. But it happens.
